#I also can’t get over lovely looking past EVERY red flag that Vincent had to offer and STUCK IT OUT | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chocolate-parfait · 3 years

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can I suggest a headcanon for arthur, theo and comte ( or dazai ) reacting to their selectively mute s/o speaking for the first time? ( maybe even singing? ) you can decide if you want a scenario for one of them and what mc sounds like, wether shes soft spoken or has a mature voice~ whatever you feel comfortable with >:0 👌 — have a nice day ! ♡

I made some research to write this but tell me if anything's inaccurate or wrong! I'll fix it right away

Selectively mute MC - ikevamp headcanons (Arthur, Theo & Comte)

Arthur

Arthur's a bit suspicious when he sees how uncomfortable you seem to be on your first night. No normal person would feel completely at ease, that's for sure, and yet the way your gaze flickers around the room, the way you fidget with your own hands, the look of pure anxiety on your pretty features, they're all blatant red flags for him, though he decides to let you be. It's your first night, after all, for all he knows you could just be terribly shy, right?

He started piecing the signs together after a couple days when your voice was yet to be heard. The only thing they knew was your name, which you wrote on a piece of paper after Vincent's many soft encouragements.

The English writer had tried flirting with you a couple times, but after being met with the same indicators of discomfort as night one, he decided to step back and watch from the sidelines, occasionally helping others translate whatever you were trying to tell them with your body language.

Selective mutism had been diagnosed around 1870 for the first time, and although it was still a relatively new medical condition, he still was a couple decades more experienced when it came to medicine. After realizing that was your case, he moved to inform everyone in the mansion so that they could adjust their behaviors and avoid causing you too much distress.

Eventually Arthur becomes the person you spend most time with in the whole house; you can feel he genuinely cares and, despite the voices you had heard about his incorrigible attitudes and questionable habits, you start appreciating all the efforts he puts into making sure you're always comfortable and understood (his efforts were very much succeeding, by the way).

On one particular night, you decided to bring some coffee to his room, a silent gesture of support in his regards, but once you entered the bedroom, he turned to look you in the eyes and you saw his beautiful blue orbs, usually alight with mischief, now dark and wavering, surrounded by puffy, red skin. He had been crying. Despite all his best efforts to hide it, everyone knew the writer had his own ghosts from the past haunting him, but seeing him so wretched and broken made your heart squeeze in sympathy and pity.

Seeing your worried expression Arthur immediately turned the other way, letting out a self deprecating laugh as he thought this was probably not helping with your case at all. "Ah- D-don't worry about me! I just got some dust in my eyes. Clumsy old me-!" You set down the tray on his desk and put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"A-arthur, you can tell me. I'm here for you."

His heart almost flew out of his chest as his wide eyes stared at you in disbelief. He abruptly stood up and had to stop himself from hugging you and twirling you around, grabbing your shoulders instead. "MC, you just spoke right now, didn't you?!". He was so shocked he completely forgot about his troubles and spent minutes fawning over you. He didn't realize he was coming off as too strong until he noticed your voice getting quieter and quieter. He then apologized and took a moment to cool himself off.

From then on, your relationship goes through revolutionary changes as he finally gets to learn more about your past, tastes and personality. Each little detail makes him more and more interested in what had been a complete mystery to everyone for days. As the writer of Sherlock Holmes he certainly couldn't let this one chance fly out of the window now, could he?

If his brain malfunctioned when he heard your voice for the first time, it is pretty accurate to say that he almost passed away for the second time when he heard your laugh! It's the best and most effective antidepressant he's tried in a long time, and the more open you become, the more the look in your eyes starts to brighten up, a worthy rival to the breathtaking smile that graces your lips every now and then.

Your voice is sweet, calm and soft, and Arthur feels as if he's floating on a cloud whenever he hears it. It isn't loud, either, making everything you say seem like the most intimate secret one could whisper to a close friend. On the other hand, your laugh is like the clear and light tinkling of a bell. Each time you let out even the smallest of chuckles his cheeks flush with a rosy blush, earning him stares and teasing remarks from the closest fellow vampire in the room.

Slowly, he starts to see his reactions for what they are: sprouts of a new love. As time passes by, he realizes he wants to hear more and more of your voice. He wants to hear you whimper his name lost in overwhelming pleasure, he wants to hear all the sweet nothings and declarations of love you can offer him, comforting words, even gibberish and dark secrets. Everything that comes out of your mouth is like molten gold to him, and he wants it all to himself.

He starts bragging to others, though it does not take long before you're comfortable enough to grace them with the sound of what Arthur has come to love so much. On one side he's jealous because you've denied him the privilege of being the only one to hear your voice, but at the same time he's also extremely proud of you! You're finally happy and there's no more traces of anxiety and worry in your eyes whenever you're surrounded by the other vampires, and that's one of the most important milestones he's honored have witnessed by your side.

Theo

Let's just say that you and theo start off on the wrong foot. To say that you're frightened of him at first is an understatement, and you very much avoid him for as much as you can. He feels guilt strangling his throat whenever he sees your quivering form running away from him, and after noting that you behaved similarly with everyone and still hadn't uttered a word in days made him worry even more.

Arthur's the one who comes up with a diagnosis, and with that everyone changes their manners and speech to make you feel more at ease. Theo, just like his blue haired friend, is actually pretty good at reading body language so he has no particular struggles when it comes to your needs. Unfortunately, he's not so smooth in regulating his tone and words, which often come out a little to harsh. Vincent often reprimands him for it, and he can't help but feel even worse when he realizes he's probably ruining your whole stay.

He starts distancing himself, and you gradually start sticking by the local angel's side, never leaving him for even a second; his vibes are so pure and soothing that they help you out with your anxiety and symptoms. Needless to say, he's also very understanding and is not at all bothered to speak in your stead. This leads to Vincent being the first one to hear your voice, and he's without doubt elated, but he also wishes for you to be able to socialize with the others, too. Theo in particular.

After days and days of the artist's endless rants on how good his little brother actually is, your image of the gruff man has been replaced by that of a soft hearted puppy. Too bad that this soft puppy looks like a hungry hunt dog more than a small, soft cloud of love.

Ironically enough, what brings you and Theo to a new stage of your basically nonexistent relationship is King. In the dog's presence he lets his guards down and turns into a loving owner of a very good and friendly golden nugget, subsequently becoming more approachable. Besides, everyone knows how helpful animals are in fighting anxiety and social disorders! And on the advice of Arthur, he invites you to his daily walk with his dog, hoping your fear will melt away with time.

He's a stubborn man, and even when such delicate issues come his way, he has no intention of giving up. No matter how much time it'll take him, he believes he's going to convince you he's not that bad as you first thought. Why is he trying so hard though? Well, not only it's something that stems from Vincent's care for you, but it's also something for your own good. If you were to avoid him for a whole month, you'd get nothing out of it, and a constant lingering sense of panic would follow you pretty much anywhere; but living for a whole month in those conditions is a no-no for Theo. He has no intention of uselessly make you suffer like that, and as he reminds himself of that, his willpower strengthens his determination to search for a common ground between you two.

Albeit slowly, you start getting less tense around him, and the fright fades away bit by bit with each walk in the woods with the Dutch art dealer and the excited bundle of golden hair. It's a lengthy process that takes many days, but Theo finally knows his efforts aren't vain when he hears you coo at the golden retriever. "King... you're such a good boy.." You say with with the warmest smile he had ever seen painted on someone's face as you patted his canine friend's head lovingly. In that moment he wished he could frame the scene and hang it up in his room next to his brother's paintings.

He didn't know whether it was the emotion of hearing your voice for the first time or the implications that told him you weren't that scared of him anymore, but he became hyper aware that his wasn't a normal heartbeat. Unsteady and crazy like that of a lovestruck fool. Was this all it took him to fall head over heels for someone? Or was this a process that had started way before?

It still takes you some time to be fully able to speak complete sentences in his presence, but once you do, he's overcome with one of the greatest feelings of satisfaction he had ever felt in his two lives, and he can definitely agree that everything was worth the wait and the labour.

Just like Arthur, your laugh almost makes him fly through the roof, but what turns him into a formless puddle of mushy feelings and amazement is your singing voice. The first time he hears you intone a medley to him he turns to stone and just stays there, unmoving. He has an eye for finding hidden talents, but oh God was your singing unexpected. His feeling may be out of place here, but he's so, so glad to have your singing all to himself. He finds the act extremely intimate, and for how much he may believe he doesn't deserve it, he cannot deny the positive effects it has on him

Sometimes, when you're talking to him, you can see him turn his face away and smile to himself like an idiot. In those times, he's thinking about how far you two came, and how glad he is to have persisted as much as he did.

Comte

Comte emanates a slightly threatening and imposing aura but it can also be calm and placid, like his voice. First and foremost he's a gentleman, but he sometimes comes off as very intimidating to those who are not used being around such strong presences like his. Luckily, he's a very patient man, and you can feel no judgement nor malice coming from him. He's lived a long, long life, and he knows better than overstepping people's boundaries and making fun of their insecurities.

When with him, you can do things at your own pace! If you don't feel like talking then he's totally okay with it; take your time to find your own way and pace of doing things, he'll gladly help if you ever ask him (with gestures or, once you're closer, with words).

The panic you feel in his presence dissolves gradually; there are no particular events that cause a turning point in your relationship, it just happens. Despite living in such a big mansion, avoiding all life forms is pretty much impossible, so you happen to share some interactions every now and then. Sometimes it's an afternoon tea, others it's just him making small talk as you clean his room (he's either talking to himself or asks answers you can nod to if you feel more comfortable). He immediately makes it clear that he doesn't expect nor want to pressure you in delivering any answer, and if you ever happen to feel too overwhelmed he excuses himself and leaves the room.

One day as you were dusting the shelves in his office, he casually says:"The weather's really nice today." But your head doesn't move in assent, instead he receives a shocking reply despite the ordinariness of the topic. "It really is... T-there's not a cloud in the sky, either." A shocked expression momentarily appears on his features, soon replaced by a wide smile as he hums back in agreement.

He doesn't let it show but he's utterly in love with your voice. It's an addiction but he still wants to give you enough space and time to get comfortable with the idea of speaking around him, so he tries to keep himself in check all the time.

It's when he hears you singing that he can't help but feel greedy, and the rare sight of Comte's blushing cheeks greets you for the first time ever. It's his weak point, use it as you may deem ;)

(okay but jokes aside WHY would you ever want to use it against him, he'd build a pyramid with a butter knife while doing a backflip if you asked him to tbh,, the man is Whipped.)

Everything you do has a meaning and a significance, so he's always taking in even the smallest piece of information you may subconsciously slip his way. Seeing how you trust him enough to lower your guards about him makes him all the more appreciative of the bond you two share. For this reason, if you ever want to try and get over your anxiety, he'll be there to walk with you from the first to the last step of your journey.

His favorite thing is when he's holding you in his arms, nuzzled against his chest while he dozes off to your heavenly humming. It makes him feel like a prince living his happy ever after in a fairytale and he couldn't be more grateful.

#my writing #ikemen vampire #ikevamp scenarios #ikevamp headcanons #ikevamp imagines #ikevamp comte #ikevamp arthur #ikevamp theo #arthur conan doyle #theodorus van gogh #comte de saint germain #answered

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path-of-my-childhood · 5 years

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The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift

By: Brian Hiatt for The Rolling Stone Magazine Date: September 18th 2019

In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to 'Lover' and much, much more.

Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.

In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.

In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”

The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.

How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.

Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”

She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”

When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong. Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.

It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it? I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.

But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation. The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.

Meaning? I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.

Do your regrets on that extend to the way the “girl squad” thing was perceived? Yeah, I never would have imagined that people would have thought, “This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it.” Holy shit, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Oh, this did not go the way that I thought it was going to go.” I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to do. The patriarchy allows men to have bro packs. If you’re a male artist, there’s an understanding that you have respect for your counterparts.

Whereas women are expected to be feuding with each other? It’s assumed that we hate each other. Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.

How much of a danger was there of falling into that thought pattern yourself? The messaging is dangerous, yes. Nobody is immune, because we’re a product of what society and peer groups and now the internet tells us, unless we learn differently from experience.

You once sang about a star who “took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out.” In 2016, you wrote in your journal, “This summer is the apocalypse.” How close did you come to quitting altogether? I definitely thought about that a lot. I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it. I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right? Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation. Hayley Kiyoko was doing an interview and she made an example about how I get away with singing about straight relationships and people don’t give me shit the way they give her shit for singing about girls — and it’s totally valid. Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.” And if they say you’re playing the victim, that completely undermines your ability to ever verbalize how you feel unless it’s positive. So, OK, should I just smile all the time and never say anything hurts me? Because that’s really fake. Or should I be real about how I’m feeling and have valid, legitimate responses to things that happened to me in my life? But wait, would that be playing the victim?

How do you escape that mental trap? Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it. So you realize you might be this amalgamation of criticisms that were hurled at you, and not an actual person who’s made any of these choices themselves. And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.

“The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead!” was funny — but how seriously should we take it? There’s a part of me that definitely is always going to be different. I needed to grow up in many ways. I needed to make boundaries, to figure out what was mine and what was the public’s. That old version of me that shares unfailingly and unblinkingly with a world that is probably not fit to be shared with? I think that’s gone. But it was definitely just, like, a fun moment in the studio with me and Jack [Antonoff] where I wanted to play on the idea of a phone call — because that’s how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn’t have picked up.

It would have been much easier if that’s what you’d just said. It would have been so, so great if I would have just said that [laughs].

Some of the Lover iconography does suggest old Taylor’s return, though. I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.

Did you do anything wrong from your perspective in dealing with that phone call? Is there anything you regret? The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.

I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me. When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, “This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.” But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19. But the 2015 VMAs come around. He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hourlong conversation, and he’s like, “I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,” and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, “MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!” [His exact words: “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”] And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk shit. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologize. And I was like, “You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.” So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song.

The line being “. . . me and Taylor might still have sex”? [Nods] And I was like, “OK, good. We’re back on good terms.” And then when I heard the song, I was like, “I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.” And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened. [West denied any involvement in Pusha-T’s revelation of Drake’s child and apologized for sending “negative energy” toward Drake.]

When did you get to the place that’s described on the opening track of Lover, “I Forgot That You Existed”? It was sometime on the Reputation tour, which was the most transformative emotional experience of my career. That tour put me in the healthiest, most balanced place I’ve ever been. After that tour, bad stuff can happen to me, but it doesn’t level me anymore. The stuff that happened a couple of months ago with Scott [Borchetta] would have leveled me three years ago and silenced me. I would have been too afraid to speak up. Something about that tour made me disengage from some part of public perception I used to hang my entire identity on, which I now know is incredibly unhealthy.

What was the actual revelation? It’s almost like I feel more clear about the fact that my job is to be an entertainer. It’s not like this massive thing that sometimes my brain makes it into, and sometimes the media makes it into, where we’re all on this battlefield and everyone’s gonna die except one person, who wins. It’s like, “No, do you know what? Katy is going to be legendary. Gaga is going to be legendary. Beyoncé is going to be legendary. Rihanna is going to be legendary. Because the work that they made completely overshadows the myopia of this 24-hour news cycle of clickbait.” And somehow I realized that on tour, as I was looking at people’s faces. We’re just entertaining people, and it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s interesting to look at these albums as a trilogy. 1989 was really a reset button. Oh, in every way. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that that decision was mine and mine alone, and it was definitely met with a lot of resistance. Internally.

After realizing that things were not all smiles with your former label boss, Scott Borchetta, it’s hard not to wonder how much additional conflict there was over things like that. A lot of the best things I ever did creatively were things that I had to really fight — and I mean aggressively fight — to have happen. But, you know, I’m not like him, making crazy, petty accusations about the past. . . . When you have a business relationship with someone for 15 years, there are going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But I truly, legitimately thought he looked at me as the daughter he never had. And so even though we had a lot of really bad times and creative differences, I was going to hang my hat on the good stuff. I wanted to be friends with him. I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me, just because it felt like it was family. To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of “Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.”

He accused you of declining the Parkland march and Manchester benefit show. Unbelievable. Here’s the thing: Everyone in my team knew if Scooter Braun brings us something, do not bring it to me. The fact that those two are in business together after the things he said about Scooter Braun — it’s really hard to shock me. And this was utterly shocking. These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.

In some ways, on a musical level, Lover feels like the most indie-ish of your albums. That’s amazing, thank you. It’s definitely a quirky record. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments — older in terms of when I used to use them. Because when I was making 1989, I was so obsessed with it being this concept of Eighties big pop, whether it was Eighties in its production or Eighties in its nature, just having these big choruses — being unapologetically big. And then Reputation, there was a reason why I had it all in lowercase. I felt like it wasn’t unapologetically commercial. It’s weird, because that is the album that took the most amount of explanation, and yet it’s the one I didn’t talk about. In the Reputation secret sessions I kind of had to explain to my fans, “I know we’re doing a new thing here that I’d never done before.” I’d never played with characters before. For a lot of pop stars, that’s a really fun trick, where they’re like, “This is my alter ego.” I had never played with that before. It’s really fun. And it was just so fun to play with on tour — the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.

“Daylight” is a beautiful song. It feels like it could have been the title track. It almost was. I thought it might be a little bit too sentimental.

And I guess maybe too on-the-nose. Right, yeah, way too on-the-nose. That’s what I thought, because I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept. That’s why “You Need to Calm Down” can make sense within the theme of the album — one of the things it addresses is how certain people are not allowed to live their lives without discrimination just based on who they love.

For the more organic songs on this album, like “Lover” and “Paper Rings,” you said you were imagining a wedding band playing them. How often does that kind of visualization shape a song’s production style? Sometimes I’ll have a strange sort of fantasy of where the songs would be played. And so for songs like “Paper Rings” or “Lover” I was imagining a wedding-reception band, but in the Seventies, so they couldn’t play instruments that wouldn’t have been invented yet. I have all these visuals. For Reputation, it was nighttime cityscape. I didn’t really want any — or very minimal — traditional acoustic instruments. I imagined old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery. So I wanted the production to have nothing wooden. There’s no wood floors on that album. Lover is, like, completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.

How did you come to use high school metaphors to touch on politics with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”? There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

I feel like your Fall Out Boy fandom might’ve slipped out in that title. I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”

You sing about “American stories burning before me.” Do you mean the illusions of what America is? It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific.

You’re in this weird place of being a blond, blue-eyed pop star in this era — to the point where until you endorsed some Democratic candidates, right-wingers, and worse, assumed you were on their side. I don’t think they do anymore. Yeah, that was jarring, and I didn’t hear about that until after it had happened. Because at this point, I, for a very long time, I didn’t have the internet on my phone, and my team and my family were really worried about me because I was not in a good place. And there was a lot of stuff that they just dealt with without telling me about it. Which is the only time that’s ever happened in my career. I’m always in the pilot seat, trying to fly the plane that is my career in exactly the direction I want to take it. But there was a time when I just had to throw my hands up and say, “Guys, I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you to just take over for me and I’m just going to disappear.”

Are you referring to when a white-supremacist site suggested you were on their team? I didn’t even see that, but, like, if that happened, that’s just disgusting. There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.

You took a lot of heat for not getting involved. Does any part of you regret that you just didn’t say “fuck it” and gotten more specific when you said to vote that November? Totally. Yeah, I regret a lot of things all the time. It’s like a daily ritual.

Were you just convinced that it would backfire? That’s literally what it was. Yeah. It’s a very powerful thing when you legitimately feel like numbers have proven that pretty much everyone hates you. Like, quantifiably. That’s not me being dramatic. And you know that.

There were a lot of people in those stadiums. It’s true. But that was two years later. . . . I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

Here’s a hard question for you: As a superfan, what did you think of the Game of Thrones finale? Oh, my God. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. So, clinically our brain responds to our favorite show ending the same way we feel when a breakup occurs. I read that. There’s no good way for it to end. No matter what would have happened in that finale, people still would have been really upset because of the fact that it’s over.

I was glad to see you confirm that your line about a “list of names” was a reference to Arya. I like to be influenced by movies and shows and books and stuff. I love to write about a character dynamic. And not all of my life is going to be as kind of complex as these intricate webs of characters on TV shows and movies.

There was a time when it was. That’s amazing.

But is the idea that as your own life becomes less dramatic, you’ll need to pull ideas from other places? I don’t feel like that yet. I think I might feel like that possibly when I have a family. If I have a family. [Pauses] I don’t know why I said that! But that’s what I’ve heard from other artists, that they were very protective of their personal life, so they had to draw inspiration from other things. But again, I don’t know why I said that. Because I don’t know how my life is going to go or what I’m going to do. But right now, I feel like it’s easier for me to write than it ever was.

You don’t talk about your relationship, but you’ll sing about it in wildly revealing detail. What’s the difference for you? Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling... There is that weird conflict in being a confessional songwriter and then also having my life, you know, 10 years ago, be catapulted into this strange pop-culture thing.

I’ve heard you say that people got too interested in which song was about who, which I can understand — at the same time, to be fair, it was a game you played into, wasn’t it? I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless. So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy. But at the same time, writing songs has never been a strategic element of my career. But I’m not scared anymore to say that other things in my career, like how to market an album, are strictly strategic. And I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to. And so I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business. But, it’s a different part of my brain than I use to write.

You’ve been masterminding your business since you were a teenager. Yeah, but I’ve also tried very hard — and this is one thing I regret — to convince people that I wasn’t the one holding the puppet strings of my marketing existence, or the fact that I sit in a conference room several times a week and come up with these ideas. I felt for a very long time that people don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident. We’re all forced to kind of be like, “Aw, shucks, this happened again! We’re still doing well! Aw, that’s so great.” Alex Morgan celebrating scoring a goal at the World Cup and getting shit for it is a perfect example of why we’re not allowed to flaunt or celebrate, or reveal that, like, “Oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this stuff.” I think it’s really unfair. People love new female artists so much because they’re able to explain that woman’s success. There’s an easy trajectory. Look at the Game of Thrones finale. I specifically really related to Daenerys’ storyline because for me it portrayed that it is a lot easier for a woman to attain power than to maintain it.

I mean, she did murder... It’s a total metaphor! Like, obviously I didn’t want Daenerys to become that kind of character, but in taking away what I chose to take away from it, I thought maybe they’re trying to portray her climbing the ladder to the top was a lot easier than maintaining it, because for me, the times when I felt like I was going insane was when I was trying to maintain my career in the same way that I ascended. It’s easier to get power than to keep it. It’s easier to get acclaim than to keep it. It’s easier to get attention than to keep it.

Well, I guess we should be glad you didn’t have a dragon in 2016... [Fiercely] I told you I don’t like that she did that! But, I mean, watching the show, though, maybe this is a reflection on how we treat women in power, how we are totally going to conspire against them and tear at them until they feel this — this insane shift, where you wonder, like, “What changed?” And I’ve had that happen, like, 60 times in my career where I’m like, “OK, you liked me last year, what changed? I guess I’ll change so I can keep entertaining you guys.”

You once said that your mom could never punish you when you were little because you’d punish yourself. This idea of changing in the face of criticism and needing approval — that’s all part of wanting to be good, right? Whatever that means. But that seems to be a real driving force in your life. Yeah, that’s definitely very perceptive of you. And the question posed to me is, if you kept trying to do good things, but everyone saw those things in a cynical way and assumed them to be done with bad motivation and bad intent, would you still do good things, even though nothing that you did was looked at as good? And the answer is, yes. Criticism that’s constructive is helpful to my character growth. Baseless criticism is stuff I’ve got to toss out now.

That sounds healthy. Is this therapy talking or is this just experience? No, I’ve never been to therapy. I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly. There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.

I somehow connect all this to the lyric in “Daylight,” the idea of “so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven” — it’s a different kind of confession. I am really glad you liked that line, because that’s something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it. I told the fans last night that sometimes on my bad days, I feel like my life is a pile of crap accumulated of only the bad headlines or the bad things that have happened, or the mistakes I’ve made or clichés or rumors or things that people think about me or have thought for the last 15 years. And that was part of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, where I had a pile of literal old selves fighting each other.

But, yeah, that line is indicative of my anxiety about how in life you can’t get everything right. A lot of times you make the wrong call, make the wrong decision. Say the wrong thing. Hurt people, even if you didn’t mean to. You don’t really know how to fix all of that. When it’s, like, 29 years’ worth.

To be Mr. “Rolling Stone” for a second, there’s a Springsteen lyric, “Ain’t no one leaving this world, buddy/Without their shirttail dirty or hands a little bloody.” That’s really good! No one gets through it unscathed. No one gets through in one piece. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. I know it was hard for me, because I kind of grew up thinking, “If I’m nice, and if I try to do the right thing, you know, maybe I can just, like, ace this whole thing.” And it turns out I can’t.

It’s interesting to look at “I Did Something Bad” in this context. You pointing that out is really interesting because it’s something I’ve had to reconcile within myself in the last couple of years — that sort of “good” complex. Because from the time I was a kid I’d try to be kind, be a good person. Try really hard. But you get walked all over sometimes. And how do you respond to being walked all over? You can’t just sit there and eat your salad and let it happen. “I Did Something Bad” was about doing something that was so against what I would usually do. Katy [Perry] and I were talking about our signs. . . . [Laughs] Of course we were.

That’s the greatest sentence ever. [Laughs] I hate you. We were talking about our signs because we had this really, really long talk when we were reconnecting and stuff. And I remember in the long talk, she was like, “If we had one glass of white wine right now, we’d both be crying.” Because we were drinking tea. We’ve had some really good conversations.

We were talking about how we’ve had miscommunications with people in the past, not even specifically with each other. She’s like, “I’m a Scorpio. Scorpios just strike when they feel threatened.” And I was like, “Well, I’m an archer. We literally stand back, assess the situation, process how we feel about it, raise a bow, pull it back, and fire.” So it’s completely different ways of processing pain, confusion, misconception. And oftentimes I’ve had this delay in feeling something that hurts me and then saying that it hurts me. Do you know what I mean? And so I can understand how people in my life would have been like, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was how you felt.” Because it takes me a second.

If you watch the video of the 2009 VMAs, I literally freeze. I literally stand there. And that is how I handle any discomfort, any pain. I stand there, I freeze. And then five minutes later, I know how I feel. But in the moment, I’m probably overreacting and I should be nice. Then I process it, and in five minutes, if it’s gone, it’s past, and I’m like, “I was overreacting, everything’s fine. I can get through this. I’m glad I didn’t say anything harsh in the moment.” But when it’s actually something bad that happened, and I feel really, really hurt or upset about it, I only know after the fact. Because I’ve tried so hard to squash it: “This probably isn’t what you think.” That’s something I had to work on.

You could end up gaslighting yourself. Yeah, for sure. ’Cause so many situations where if I would have said the first thing that came to my mind, people would have been like, “Whoa!” And maybe I would have been wrong or combative. So a couple of years ago I started working on actually just responding to my emotions in a quicker fashion. And it’s really helped with stuff. It’s helped so much because sometimes you get in arguments. But conflict in the moment is so much better than combat after the fact.

Well, thanks. I do feel like I just did a therapy session. As someone who’s never been to therapy, I can safely say that was the best therapy session.

#uhhhh #just by copying and editing text I see it's gonna be good =)#can't wait...#taylor swift #interview #by taylor #lover era #Rolling Stone magazine #Brian Hiatt

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thesinglesjukebox · 7 years

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TAYLOR SWIFT - LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO [4.39] Man, look what she made US do.

Elisabeth Sanders: Here is the thing about Taylor Swift: anybody that has truly loved (despite themselves) Taylor Swift has done so because of her sharp, frightening edges, because of the way in which she is the mean girl in the midst of a panic attack, because she's petty, because she's crazy, because she believes in things and at the same time when those things aren't as they seem wants to crush them in the palm of her hand. Any interpretation of Taylor Swift that doesn't incorporate this is simply bad research. In 2006: "Go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy--There's no time for tears / I'm just sitting here, planning my revenge." In 2010: "And my mother accused me of losing my mind /But I swore I was fine /You paint me a blue sky /And go back and turn it to rain /And I lived in your chess game /But you changed the rules every day /Wondering which version of you I might get on the phone, tonight /Well I stopped picking up and this song is to let you know why" In 2012: "Maybe we got lost in translation / maybe I asked for too much / or maybe this thing was a masterpiece / til you tore it all up." And finally, in 2014, a culmination of the songwriting combined with the publicity--well, just listen to "Blank Space." I can't quote the whole thing. At the time it was brilliant, a parody that dipped just enough into the real, a joke about both media extrapolation and actual content. But we're past the time for parody. It came, it was good, it went. The criticism still followed, for other reasons, for deeper reasons, for real reasons. Along with, I'm sure, superficial ones. But if "Blank Space" was Taylor Swift's petty Gone Girl fan fiction, "Look What You Made Me Do" is the unfortunate chapter in which we have to acknowledge that the fiction was never that self-aware, and that an excavation of complication, when confronted with complicated times, sometimes reveals not a complex sympathetic maybe-villain, but simply a person not equipped to be making mass art right now. Taylor's pettiness, her villainy, her strangeness, has always been her most interesting feature. Maybe, now, too many years into seeing but not seeing it, it's just--not that interesting anymore. She's not your friend, and she's not your enemy, she's just--well. As she says, "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me." I think that might be her final truth. [3]

Stephen Eisermann: I've never been a big Taylor Swift fan -- I like her music well enough, but there was always something about the details she painted and the cards she showed that it felt a bit... made-up. Still, I always had a weird feeling that Taylor and I had very similar personalities and personal life trajectories (bear with me) and this song reinforces that. When I was younger and "straight" (16-18), I was very quiet, nice to a fault, and introverted. Thanks to my name and skin color, a lot of (racist) older people always said it was hard to believe I was a Mexican teenager because I was so quiet, polite, well-spoken and bright. Much like Swizzle during the "Taylor Swift" and "Fearless" era, I was considered naive but genuine-hearted and people loved to love my niceness. However, I soon started coming to terms with my sexuality and started being a bit more open with myself and others about who I truly was, just like we saw glimpses of pure pop and more evocative lyrics in "Speak Now" and "Red." I still built stories and a narrative that painted me as more mystery than gay, just as Taylor toed the line between squeaky clean young adult and Lolita, but I was a bit more willing to explore. Soon after, the inevitable happened and I finally had my first NSFW encounter with a man, and was even MORE willing to be who I really was. I let my gay flag fly and if people asked, I wouldn't dance around the question, but own who I was. Taylor didn't hesitate one bit when she announced 1989 would be a pop album in its entirety, and I didn't so much was stutter when telling questioning friends my realization. Still, a part of me hid things from ass-backwards family members and people who I knew wouldn't "understand," just as Sweezy continued to play the victim card to hold on to some of the innocence that was slowly falling through her fingertips like sand on the last day of vacation. However, there is only so much sand one hand can hold and BAM -- my family became aware of my sexuality and Taylor was exposed. I was at a crossroads -- do I drop my family and throw out ALL the dirty chisme I had accumulated over the years at different holidays, effectively exposing the most bigoted family members, or do I keep my mouth shut and weather the hate, being all the stronger for it? I wanted so badly to be vindictive and evil, but I choose the high road for reasons I'm not really sure I can effectively communicate. Taylor, however, has opted for the darker route. "LWYMMD" lacks detail, yes, but it's intentional. I just... I just know it. She has secrets up her sleeves she will soon reveal -- nobody willingly takes the villainous role without ammo, and Taylor has been MANY things throughout her career, but unprepared is not one of them. This song is calculated, petty, unnecessary, and very much beneath her, but it allows me to live vicariously through her and I want her to drag her detractors just as I want to drag my family members through the mud they continue to think I belong in. And just as my bigoted family members will get theirs, so will Taylor's enemies, I'm sure. [10]

Will Rivitz: "I think I have a part to play in this drama, and I have chosen to be the villain. Every good story needs a bad guy, don't you think?" -Lorelei Granger, Frindle (Andrew Clements, 1996) [9]

David Moore: Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (Image Comics, 2015) Synopsis: Years ago, a young woman obsessed with music videos and mythic pop celebrity made a deal with the King Behind the Screen -- she gave up half of herself to gain the mystical power needed to eventually lead a coven of music obsessives. Now the deal's gone sour, and her darker, sacrificed self has switched places to destroy the coven with an ill-advised electroclash revival. [7]

Alfred Soto: Electronic swoops, piano on the bridge, lots of boom boom bap -- this single could be the new St. Vincent, or, to return to once upon a long time ago, to a track from Lorde's estimable Melodrama, a flop also largely co-written with Jack Antonoff. A skeptic of her first singles since 2009, I approached "Look..." with caution; on the evidence she's anticipated this caution. "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me," she sings while soap opera strings add the requisite melodrama, and for a moment I thought she sang "I don't trust my body." I've never cared about biographical parallels in any art, especially in popular art where the insistence feels like conscription; the blank space where she wants the audience to write his/her/whatever's name is a sop to us. Less persuasive is the talk-sung part informing her audience that the "old Taylor" is "dead," as if Fearless fans needed an 808 dug into their faces. It will sound terrific on the radio. I'll skip it when I buy the album. [5]

Crystal Leww: The emerging narrative of Jack Antonoff as the next king of pop production is perplexing because his resume is honestly pretty thin. It's unclear what Antonoff actually brings to the table other than an amplification factor; Antonoff's songs have only been as good as his collaborators. This works when artists are working with a strong vision they can execute against -- e.g., CRJ's "in love and feeling like a teen again" on "Sweetie," Lorde's earnest wide open heartbreak on Melodrama. It is damning if artists are falling into their worst habits. Taylor Swift is a very solid songwriter -- it's nearly impossible to have the kind of career she had in country music if you're not -- but it always falls back on specificity, the emotional connection that she can forge with her fans when she knows what she's trying to convey. "Look What You Made Me Do" fails because it's unclear what it's about -- is this song about haters? Kim and Kanye? Her exes? The media? -- and Antonoff using Right Said Fred makes it all seem very clunky. The song sounds like it could have really leaned into a psycho ex-girlfriend vibe, but it's not self-aware, not funny, not sure of itself. Ultimately, "Look What You Made Me Do" isn't awful, but it's not catchy, which is its worst sin of all. Taylor Swift's still a decent songwriter ("Better Man" was great; "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places" almost made up for that Zayn collab), but this isn't even yucky -- it's just kinda boring. [4]

Katherine St Asaph: The curse continues. Maybe it's that the past month I've been listening to very little but "Anatomy of a Plastic Girl" by The Opiates and "Justice" by Fotonovela and Sarah Blackwood, and here's the exact conceptual midpoint. I've heard comparisons to electroclash, NIN, mall emo, Lorde, but I hear more Jessie Malakouti or Britney on Original Doll: frantic tabloid petulance, slightly updated with a "Problem" anti-chorus, but otherwise things I like. Otherwise, Swift's style has not changed: self-referential ("actress" and "bad dreams" shuffle her images to make her the heel) and threaded with subliminals ("tilted stage" is literal, "kingdom keys" keeps up with the konsonance) Just as "Dear John" parodied its subject's lite-blooz guitar, "Look What You Made Me Do" parodies the austere tracks of 808s and Heartbreak on, like "Love Lockdown" in curdled Midwestern vowels: trading soporific for loaded. The song has inevitably become about everything but itself. Her milkshake duck brought all the boys to the yard, and they're like, this is garb, and I'm like, the Internet deplorables haven't adopted this in any better faith than they did Depeche Mode; any of pop's myriad songs about the tabloids would read as "political" if transplanted into 2017 (is Lindsay Lohan's "Rumours" about FAKE NEWS?), and Swift's suffocatingly prescriptive "Southern" "values" pre-Red were as politically suspect as this, and more insidious. The next salvo of attack: its rollout being unprecedentedly gimmicky and exploitative, never mind how aforementioned Depeche Mode did the same pre-order thing, or Britney Spears upholstered-carpetbombed "Pretty Girls" in everyone's Ubers, or Rihanna's Talk That Talk was launched with gamified "missions", or Srsly Legit Band Arcade Fire spent months on fake Stereogum posts and fake Ben and Jerry's. Doesn't help that when Taylor is bad, she's stunningly, loudly bad; the second verse, in its magnification of the cringiest parts of "Shake It Off" and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," seems to last forever. (The phone call is fine, though; no one had a problem with "How Ya Doin'" or, like, "Telephone.") It's no good for catharsis, definitely not relatable, maybe on purpose: like being too sexy for your shirt, all you feel is cold. [6]

Katie Gill: On the one hand, Taylor using the language of abusers in the chorus of her song is clueless at best and worrisome at worst. On the other hand, blatantly riffing off of "I'm Too Sexy" is a surprisingly smart choice for a chorus and I'm shocked that I can't think of anyone who's tried it before with this level of success. But on the one hand, for a song about how she's getting smarter and harder, the lyrics don't reflect that, giving us some petty Regina George level nonsense instead of anything remotely resembling depth or nuance. But then again, that snake is pouring Taylor Swift some tea and all the Taylor Swifts are beating up the other Taylor Swifts in a battle royale hahaha this video is so amazingly dumb. I guess I'll split the difference and give it a [5]

Alex Clifton: I've always wanted give-no-fucks Taylor Swift, but I'm dying for context, as this album (and sing) will sink or swim based entirely on the narrative she creates. She's clearly setting herself on fire in order to rebrand herself, although I question her self-awareness. The music video indicates yes, with a brilliant 30-second scene featuring various Taylors mocking each other. Yet "Look What You Made Me Do" is also curiously passive, with a reactionary title and a bored chorus--more a sign of privilege and status. The ambiguity between honest, wronged victim and villainous persona here is intriguing, especially given Swift's penchant for earnestness; obviously she cannot be both, but the tension drives the song. The song itself is a mixed bag; Swift returns to the messy rapping last heard on "Shake It Off" with an equally cringey spoken-word interlude, but her voice is simutaneously delicate and confident as she comes out swinging. While I love seeing Blood!Swift writing a hitlist of enemies like an evil Santa Claus and the hint of confronting the less attractive/more honest parts of her role in the spotlight, only time will tell whether this is truly a playful new direction or more of the same old tune. (Also, what did we make her do? The answer is classic Swift, diabolically obvious: we made her write a song about it.) [7]

Jessica Doyle: A week on I still hear more self-loathing than anything else. Nothing the supposed New Taylor offers up comes off particularly convincingly; there's no glee in her reinvention. Compare the way she rushes through honey-I-rose-up-from-the-dead when she once sounded like she was thoroughly enjoying Boys only want love when it's torture. She doesn't sound smarter, or harder; look what you made me do, when she's spent the last eighteen months making a point of not doing anything. There's no air in here, no space beyond the multiple annotated versions and multiple thinkpieces declaring her a walking horsebitch of the Trumpocalypse. Just Taylor Swift practicing telling herself to shut up, Taylor Swift wondering about karma, Taylor Swift reading Buzzfeed and taking careful notes, Taylor Swift unable to make a point about anything at all except Taylor Swift. You don't realize, when you're in the thick of it, that self-loathing is just as relentlessly, narrowly egotistical as any other kind of self-obsession. It gets old, finally. It wears you out. It wears everybody out. Right? Yes? Can we all agree to be worn out now? Are we going to allow her to move on? She can't rise up from the dead if we don't let her die first. [3]

Cassy Gress: There was a time when I thought 1989 pajama-parties-and-kittens Taylor was the "real Taylor." I don't know if that really was. What I do know is that trying to figure out who the "real Taylor" is, and arguing on the internet about it, is fucking exhausting. So much of her musical output has been autobiographical, or meant to sound generically autobiographical to women listeners; so much of her reads as "pussycat with claws." Sometimes she emphasizes the pussycat side, soft and vulnerable; "Look What You Made Me Do" is the claws side. But Taylor, who we know has the ability to be nuanced and evocative, is here transmitting her intent (to destroy Kanye, or Katy, or Hiddleston, or her old selves, or just to be the cleverest sausage) like a hammer to the skull. This, like much else about her, is exhausting to watch/listen to. I would much rather close the blinds and put on my headphones and watch GBBO reruns in my jammies. [2]

Olivia Rafferty: Washing in with the arrival of her sixth album are a tidal wave of thinkpieces on Swift, all set within the context of her A-list feuds, miscalculations and politics, or lack thereof. We've all sifted through stories of fake boyfriends, cheap shots and oblivious colonialism, and I'm going to speak for all of us when I say we probably should just all take a goddamn break from the vortex. I'm placing LWYMMD in a vacuum for now. Reaching into the embarrassing depths of my personal history, I can draw up two different past-Olivias who would be a perfect fit for this song. I'm gifting the verse, pre-chorus and middle eight to my 10-year-old self, and the chorus to my 17-year-old self. Olivia at 10 would lap up the overly-dramatic opening lines, the "I. Don't. Likes" and their thick punctuation. It's served with the attitude that would have made you want to stick on a crop top and pick up one of your tiny handbags to fling about during an ill-prepared dance routine -- no, Mum, it's not finished yet! And the moment of absolute pre-teen glory is the cheerleader delivery of the spoken half-verse, "the world moves on another day another drama drama," I can literally see the Beanie Baby music video re-enactment. All of these melodic aspects are playful but lack the precision or maturity you'd expect Swift to deliver on this "good girl grown up" song. When the chorus hits you suddenly mature into that 17 year-old whose friends-but-not-really-friends played that Peaches song at someone's house party. You could probably embarassingly attempt a slut-drop to it in your bedroom, pretending you're a dominatrix who's just split some milk on the floor. But the overall impression is that if Swift is trying to be naughty, sexy or dangerous, she's missed the mark a little. Now at 25 I'm listening and thinking that the chorus still snaps, but if this track was an attempt at sexualising Taylor in a way that's not been done before, it's only made it clear that she's still got a lot of growing up to do. [6]

Joshua Copperman: From the first bar chimes sound effect, I was worried, and I suppose my feelings didn't improve by the time the "tilted stage" line happened. On "Out Of The Woods", Antonoff and Swift brought out the best in each other (Jack's big choruses, Taylor's specific references), but on "Look What You Made Me Do", they bring out the worst (Jack's obnoxiousness, Taylor's pettiness.) Antonoff can do flamboyant earnestness, especially when it blends with Lorde's self-awareness and quirkiness; he just can't do dark and edgy. Or even campy, apparently: the glorious video mostly takes care of that, giving the song an intensity and glamour that it doesn't have nor deserve on its own. Yet even the video often misses the humor inherent in moments like the terrible rap in the second verse, or the already-infamous lift from "I'm Too Sexy". The ultimate effect is like John Green praising a burn of himself without realizing why the burn was deserved in the first place. In this case, it's one Taylor saying to another Taylor "there she goes, playing the victim, again", even though the preceding song couldn't even play the victim or villain well enough. [4]

Mo Kim: There was a time in my life when I looked up to Taylor Swift. I was eighteen once, clearing my throat of all the doubts that haunted it, and the only way I had to express myself was through songs about slights that exploded like firecrackers. But a voice with that strength comes with responsibility. Sometimes you need to stop reveling in the volume of your own speech to see the platform of power you stand on; otherwise you might build a version of yourself on the rickety foundation of innocence only to find it crashing down. On "Look What You Made Me Do," she's still trying for the pottery shard hooks that once made her so important to petty queer kids like me. It works in bits and spurts: that second verse is a bucket of water and an emergency siren to the face, and the pre-chorus utilizes a sinister piano and eerie vocal production to great effect. Too bad, then, that the flimsy chorus and winky-face lyrics cave in on themselves more easily than almost anything she's written before (like a house of cards, some might say). That it so blatantly abjects responsibility onto her audience, however, is the biggest point against it: instead of personability, or at least the pretense of it, there's just layer after layer of metanarrative. Instead of a telling that acknowledges her history -- a complicated, troubling, rich one -- there's just Queen Bee Taylor, sneering over a landfill heap of old Taylors before she discards of all her past selves. I used to hold stadiums in my chest as I listened to the stories Swift spun; now I feel like the lights have finally crackled out, and here she is, dithering in the debris of her crumbling empire, and here we are, looking down. [5]

Josh Love: If Taylor wants to go in, that's her prerogative, but because this is a song that none of us plebes can actually relate to, it's only fair to judge it solely based on whether it goes hard, and I'm sorry to report that Taylor has no bars. "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Shake It Off" seemed like wild stabs at first too, but they possessed an inclusivity that's curdled into Yeezus-level petulance here. There's nothing here to suggest she's capable of making Reputation her Lemonade. At least the video gives me some hope that maybe she realizes she's a complete dork. [3]

Anthony Easton: This is the hardest for me to grade, because I still don't know if it is good, but it is constructed in such a way that people like me (critic, liberal elitist, homosexual) are pressed to have opinions. It steals with such quickness, and with such weirdness that the opinions give birth to other opinons, somewhere between a snake hall and the ouroboros she already quotes. It sounds like Lorde, it samples Peaches, it plays with electroclash, which was a genre that was already heavily recursive. It tries to be without feeling, but it feels all too deeply. That is enough to spend time with, that is enough to unpack. It sounds like Lorde because they are both working with Jack Antonoff. Who is cribbing from who here? Is Lorde playing like Swift, is Swift cribbing Lorde's lankness, are both pulling outside of their influence, by the commercial, mainstreamed weirdness of Antonoff? Swift was always pretty; her main skill was using guile to a stiletto edge. This edges on ugliness, but it is still "ugly." Women like Peaches or the cabaret singer Bridgett Everett know how to sing, have the ambition to sing well, but chose to reject good taste for social and political power. Taylor playing with being ugly, with being flat, with kind of half singing, with no longer being the cheerleader, is not a formal refusal of beauty as a political means but has the louche boredom of a hanger-on, with maybe a bit of anger at not being cool enough. It's a capital blankness that raids and doesn't contribute. Part of the ugliness of Peaches, part of the joy of electroclash, is not only how it absorbs the amoral around it--Grace Jones, The Normal, Joy Division, Klaus Nomi--but that the sex of it works so hard. The fucking is less pleasure than hard work--the grit of dirt and sweat and bodies. When Swift quotes Peaches, she is quoting the reduction of pop to a stripping down of bodies through a formal aesthetic choice. When she quotes noir, it is an attempt to self-consciously think of herself as a body who is capable of doing real damage. Swift flatters herself as someone whose suicide could be a nihilist aesthetic gesture. She flatters herself as a fatale. She's still the kid who does damage, and plays naif. You can't be pretty and ugly. You can't be a naif fatale. You can't pretend not to care about gossip and make your career about what people think of you. You can only be so much of a feminist and rest on your producers this much, and you cannot play at louche blankness if it is so obvious how much work you are doing. This might suggest that I hate the song, but I can't. Swift doing an "ugly" heel turn fills me with poptimist longing, and I want to hear more. [9]

Eleanor Graham: There is a bit in an old Never Mind The Buzzcocks where Simon Amstell says to Amy Winehouse, "We used to be close! On Popworld, we were close." And Amy Winehouse runs her hand down his face and says, half-pityingly and to thunderous laughter, "She's dead." I don't really know why I'm bringing this up except to illustrate that a woman killing off her former self, against Joan Didion's worldly advice, has a kind of power. The crudest hyperbole. Like Amy in Gone Girl. You don't like this thing about me? You wish I was different? Well, guess what -- I'M DEAD! This line, which Swift delivers with the manic kittenish venom of Reese Witherspoon's character in Big Little Lies, is the only redeeming feature of "Look What You Made Me Do." And yet -- even as someone who has openly thrown politics to the wind in the face of such forever songs as "Style", "State of Grace" and "All Too Well" -- this single is too hallucinatory to be a flat disappointment. Quite aside from the Right Said Fred debacle, the "aw" is reminiscent of Julia Michaels, the second verse of a lobotomised Miz-Biz era Hayley Williams, the production ideas of a mid-2000s CBBC show, and the whole thing of a middle-aged man in a wig playing Sky Ferreira in an SNL skit. Disorientating. Almost euphorically horrible. Say what you want about T Swift, but who else is serving this level of pop Kafkaism in 2017? [2]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Weirdly, everything works for me sorta kinda with the second verse. The percussion thuds in the distance just a little more effectively, and Taylor's whining drone of a rap screams up into that high-pitched melodrama, only to crash and burn into an anemic "Push It," as written by someone who forgot Lady Gaga once could fool us into thinking she was funny. Past that subsection and prior, however, the record truly never clicks. You get the sense that Swift, someone so eagerly to seize the moment, doesn't realize that the horror campiness plays her hand too hard. [2]

Edward Okulicz: Saved from being her worst ever single by an out-of-nowhere, brilliant, Lorde-esque pre-chorus (and the existence of both "Welcome to New York" and "Bad Blood"), this is pretty thin gruel for the first single off a first album in three years. Remember how dense her songwriting used to be? See how clumsy it is on this. Taylor Swift's devolution from essential pop star to somewhat annoying head of a cult of personality is complete. At least there'll be better to come on the album. I hope. [4]

Rachel Bowles: I am guessing (and hoping) that "Look What You Made Me Do" is Reputation's "Shake It Off," a comparatively mediocre introduction to what is ostensibly a good album with some timeless songs ("Style" in particular on 1989). Functionally the same, both songs have to reintroduce Taylor in a new iteration to a cultural narrative she cannot be excluded from, both heavy on self-awareness and light on her signature musical flair. Where "Shake It Off" felt anodyne and compressed, "LWYMMD" is beautifully stripped back, chopping between lowly sung and rhythmically spoken word over a synthesiser, strings or a beat -- verses, bridges and middle 8's passing, though ultimately building to nothing -- the chorus of "LWYMMD" being the swirling void at its centre, one that cannot hold, however fashionable it is to build then strip to anti-climax in EDM and pop. What did Taylor do? The absence of her critical action, the bloody, thirsted-for revenge, can only leave us unsatisfied, like watching a Jacobean tragedy on tilted stage without the final release of death for all. What's left is a painful, public death of media citations of Taylor, played over and over, joylessly. [5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: 1989 is Taylor Swift's worst album, but that shouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing. For an artist whose vocal melodies were able to effectively drive a song forward, it was a bit odd hearing her rely so heavily on a song's instrumentation to do all the heavy lifting. Additionally, the painterly lyrics that drew me to her work in the first place were mostly abandoned for ones more beige (simply compare the most memorable lyrics from 1989 and any other album and it becomes very obvious). It didn't work out for the most part, but I was fine with the mediocrity. And considering how stylistically diverse the album was, I very much saw it as a stepping stone for a future project. Which is why I'm completely unsurprised by the doubling down of "Look What You Made Me Do" -- it's a lead single that's heavily tied to her media perception, finds her abandoning any sense of subtlety, and utilizes amelodic singing to put greater emphasis on the instrumentation itself. It's conceptually brilliant for all these reasons, but it doesn't come together all too well. Namely, the lyrics are almost laughably bad and distract from how physical the song can be, and her calculated attempts at announcing her self-awareness have reached the point of utter parody. That the music video ends with Swift essentially explaining the (unfunny) joke only confirms this. [3]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Every new Taylor Swift single is Vizzini from "The Princess Bride," letting us know that she knows that we know that she knows that we know that she is Taylor Swift, and since she knows that we know (etc. etc. etc.), she can be confident drinking the goblet in front of her, since she knows that she switched around the goblets when we weren't looking, and she's laughing like she's clearly outsmarted us, but little does she know that we've been building up an immunity to her odorless white poison for years. [2]

William John: The hyper-specificity is gone. There are no references here to paper airplane necklaces or dead roses in December or in-jokes written on notes left on doors. In their place, platitudes abound, choruses are forgotten, "time" rhymes with "time", and "drama" with "karma". The latter is pursued with a maniacal intensity, the parody spelled out rather brilliantly in "Blank Space" quickly undoing itself. Rather obviously, "Look What You Made Me Do" does not exist in a vacuum, and the timing and nature of its release are what render it particularly dismaying. Its author, not playing to her previously demonstrated strengths, is seemingly at great pains to fuel fire to certain celebrity feuds, all the while insisting on her exclusion from them. It wouldn't matter so much were she to denounce some of her new fans with the same fervour, but for some reason this era she's opted out of interviews, perhaps at the time when some explanation driven by someone outside her inner circle is most needed. It's one way to forge a reputation, indeed. I do like the way she screams "bad DREAMS!" though. [3]

Leonel Manzanares: An auteur whose entire schtick is about framing herself as a victim, now emboldened by the current climate to address "the haters" using the language of abuse, embracing villainhood. No wonder she's considered the ambassador of Breitbart Pop. [4]

Thomas Inskeep: "Don't you understand? It's your fault that I had to go and become a mean girl!" Yeah, okay, whatever, Ms. White Privilege. [2]

Anjy Ou: For the woman who singularly embodies white female privilege, it's kind of embarrassing that she doesn't have the range. [2]

Will Adams: If you had asked me three months ago, "Hey, between 'Swish Swish' and whatever Taylor Swift ends up putting out this year, which is the more embarrassing diss track?", I wouldn't have thought I'd need to think about the answer this much. [2]

Anaïs Escobar Mathers: "Taylor, you're doing amazing, sweetie," said no one. [1]

Sonia Yang: With an artist as polarizing as Swift, it's easy to make the conversation a messy knot about the real life conflicts she's had, but I find it more interesting to tune that all out and focus on the simplicity of her work as a standalone. "Look What You Made Me Do" is Swift at her most coldly bitter yet, but betrays the resignation of long buried hurt. It's "Blank Space" but with none of the fantastical fun; it toes the line between wary irony and jadedly "becoming the mask." Most telling is the dull echo of the song title in place of a real hook, which is actually a favorite point of mine. Reality doesn't always go out with a bang; it's more likely for one to reach a gloomy conclusion than stumbling upon a glorious epiphany. Musically, I'd call this an awkward transition phase for Taylor -- it's not her worst song ever, but it's admittedly underwhelming compared to the heights we've seen from her. However, I've sat through questionable attempts at reinvention from my favorite artists before and I'm still optimistic about the potential for Swift's growth after this. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: There is nothing Taylor Swift does better than revenge, and this is not that. This is the first Swift single that exists only in conversation with Swift's media-created persona -- even "Blank Space" turned on internally resolved narrative beats and emotional moments -- but it offers little for those who hear pop through celebrity news updates, not speakers or headphones. Compare "Look What You Made Me Do" to "Mean," a pointed and hurt missive that scarified its targets with dangerous care; this new single, however, barely extends beyond the bounds of Swift's own skull. "I don't like your little games," levels Swift, her voice venom, "the role you made me play." The central character -- the only character -- in this narrative is Swift, and she enacts an immolation. Her nastiness is the etiolated savagery of Drake in his more recent and loutish incarnation: lonely and lordly, "just a sicko, a real sicko when you get to know me." "I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time" could be Jesse Lacey on Deja Entendu but sunk into the abyss of The Devil and God -- only it's delivered over ugly, the Knife-like electro clanging. The line that succeeds is classic Swift in its brittle theatrics: "Honey, I rose up from the dead; I do it all the time." The spoken-word bridge -- the song's most blatantly campy and deliciously gothic moment -- acts as a witchy incantation, walking most precariously the line between winking vamp and public tantrum. Swift has brought her monstrous birth to the world's light; contra the title, what it is we've made her do isn't even apparent yet. [8]

Lauren Gilbert: I was 18 when "Fearless" was released, and listened to it on repeat my first term of undergrad, feeling freedom and joy and hope. I listened to "We Are Never Getting Back Together" on repeat in an on-again-off-again relationship that should have ended years before it did. I listened to 1989 over and over again after recovering from a nervous breakdown and for the first time, really, truly focused on choosing a life of joy. I should be Here For This. I am not. Pop music thrives on specificity, and Taylor Swift in particular has made a career of writing about hyperspecific situations. This is... generic; it could be sung by Katy Perry, by a female Zayn, by Kim K herself. Taylor offers no hooks to her own life here, and perhaps that's not a flaw; female songwriters have the right to choose not to expose their own lives, and to write the same generic pop song nonsense that everyone else does. But as someone who bought into the whole TSwift authenticity brand -- even while I recognized it as a brand, even while I knew that she was a multimillionaire looking out for her own interests first and foremost, even as she was the definition of a Problematic Fav -- I can't really say I care that much about new Taylor. I could fault Taylor's politics and personality -- and I'm sure other blurbs will -- but the primary failing here isn't Taylor's non-music life. It's that there's no feeling here; it feels as cynical as the line "another day, another drama". Next. [4]

Andy Hutchins: "I'm Too Sexy" + "Mr. Me Too" - basically any of the elements that made "Mr. Me Too" compelling = "Ms. I'm Sexy, Too." [4]

Tara Hillegeist: Let's leave this double-edged sword hang here for a minute: Taylor Swift's personhood is irrelevant to the reality that she is a better creator than she ever gets credit for. Since her earliest days of the demo CDs she'd like to keep buried, Taylor Swift has never been less interesting or more terrible on the ears than when her songs are forcibly positioned as autobiography. For a decade she has cultivated an audience of lovers and haters alike that never felt her--or truly felt for her--because she never wanted them to know her, driven to own her brand even as she's deliberately averred to own up to what lies behind it. Witness the framing of an Etch-a-Sketch of a song like "Look What You Made Me Do": she releases a song about vengeful self-definition mere weeks after finally winning a years-long case against a man who sexually assaulted her and tried to sue her to silence over it on the sheer strength of her own self-representation, and the air charges itself with intimations that she instead meant it for Katy Perry, whose flash-in-the-pan "friendship" she publicly and memorably disowned in a bad song about bad blood an entire album ago, or perhaps Kim Kardashian-West, a woman whose "feud" with her arguably began with Taylor Swift's attempt to paint herself as the victim in an argument with Kim's husband but ended inarguably and decisively in Kim's favor. To claim someone would mangle her targets so ineptly even the conspiracy theorists have to resort to half-guesses and deliberate misquotes to draw out the barbs is a claim it's especially ridiculous to pin on a musician like Taylor Swift, a control freak who once built a labyrinth of personal references into an album full of songs about protagonists nothing like herself just to prove a point to anyone listening to them that closely about how sturdy the songs would be without knowing any of it. A public conversation that misses the point this drastically can only occur if there's a deliberately blank space where any sense of or interest in the person it's about could exist. There is a hole where this most powerfully self-determining popstar lives where a human life has never been glimpsed--because she cast that little girl and her frail voice aside years ago in search of something altogether more influential than such a weak vessel could ever hold. The girl who cajoled her family into spending enough Merrill-Lynch money to cover for her inability to sing until she had enough professional training to sing the songs she wanted to put to her name was never the girl who could truly be a flight risk with a fear of falling, was never the girl who never did anything better than revenge. But she wanted to be the girl who sang the words for that girl, who put her words in that girl's mouth, more than anything else in the world. She staked her name on nothing less than her ability to capitalize on the reputation she acquired. The Taylor Swift of Fearless and Speak Now was a Taylor Swift who believed she could be someone else in your mind, a songwriter dexterous enough to slip between gothic pop, americana-infused new wave, and pop-punk piss-offs without shaking that crisply machine-tooled Pennsylvania diction. A decade on, she's learned a lesson enough women before her already learned it's shocking she wasn't ready for it: when you're a girl and you make something about being a girl, everyone thinks you just had yourself in mind. The proof that she was more than that--more than the songs on the radio, you might say--was always there; it wasn't hidden, it wasn't obscured. But from Red onwards that Taylor began to die; a straighter Taylor Swift emerged in more ways than just her hair, all the kinks ironing themselves out in favor of her remodeling herself into a different sort of someone else's voice. Where once stood a Taylor Swift who sang for the sake of seeing her words sung by someone else's mouth back to her, there now stood a Taylor Swift who sang everyone else's words about her back to them. Tabloids cannot resurrect a life that a woman never lived, and no amount of retrospective sleight of hand about the girl she might have lied about being can hide the truth that neither can she. Conspiracy theories only flourish when people treat the mystery of human motives like a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be solved--ignoring that she already made it clear that was, still and always, the wrong answer to the questions she wouldn't let them ask. She wanted fame, she wanted a reputation; she wanted them on terms she defined; she never wanted anything else half as much as she wanted that. She has used every means available to her to earn them. Her awkward adolescence took a backseat to her life's dream of conquering America's radio. It's no shock, then, that all this gossip-mongering rings as hollow as a crown. The messy melodrama of Southern sympathy and thin-voiced warbles that defined the sweethearted ladygirls of generations before her and beside her and will define those that come after her, the sloppy humanities of Britney and Dolly and Tammy and Leann and Kesha Rose; these fumbling honesties, these vulnerabilities have never been tools in Taylor's narrative repertoire the way she uses the white girlhood she shares with them has been. She owned her protagonists' anxieties; but those songs have never defined her. This was always the moral to the story of Taylor Swift, to anyone--condemning or compassionate--who cared to really hear it: behind her careful compositions and obsessive pleas, Taylor Swift was never interested in making herself a real person at all. That would have cost her everything she ever wanted. And we, the Cicerone masses, ought very well to ask ourselves, before we let that double-edged sword finally fall: would it have been any more worth it, to anyone, if she had been? [2]

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The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift

In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to 'Lover' and much, much more

By BRIAN HIATT

When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong.

Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.

It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it?

I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.�� And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.

But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation.

The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.

Meaning?

I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.

Do your regrets on that extend to the way the “girl squad” thing was perceived?

Yeah, I never would have imagined that people would have thought, “This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it.” Holy shit, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Oh, this did not go the way that I thought it was going to go.” I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to do. The patriarchy allows men to have bro packs. If you’re a male artist, there’s an understanding that you have respect for your counterparts.

Whereas women are expected to be feuding with each other?

It’s assumed that we hate each other. Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.

How much of a danger was there of falling into that thought pattern yourself?

The messaging is dangerous, yes. Nobody is immune, because we’re a product of what society and peer groups and now the internet tells us, unless we learn differently from experience.

I definitely thought about that a lot. I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it. I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right?

Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation. Haley Kiyoko was doing an interview and she made an example about how I get away with singing about straight relationships and people don’t give me shit the way they give her shit for singing about girls — and it’s totally valid. Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.” And if they say you’re playing the victim, that completely undermines your ability to ever verbalize how you feel unless it’s positive. So, OK, should I just smile all the time and never say anything hurts me? Because that’s really fake. Or should I be real about how I’m feeling and have valid, legitimate responses to things that happened to me in my life? But wait, would that be playing the victim?

How do you escape that mental trap?

Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it. So you realize you might be this amalgamation of criticisms that were hurled at you, and not an actual person who’s made any of these choices themselves. And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.

“The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead!” was funny — but how seriously should we take it?

There’s a part of me that definitely is always going to be different. I needed to grow up in many ways. I needed to make boundaries, to figure out what was mine and what was the public’s. That old version of me that shares unfailingly and unblinkingly with a world that is probably not fit to be shared with? I think that’s gone. But it was definitely just, like, a fun moment in the studio with me and Jack [Antonoff] where I wanted to play on the idea of a phone call — because that’s how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn’t have picked up.

It would have been much easier if that’s what you’d just said.

It would have been so, so great if I would have just said that [laughs].

Some of the Lover iconography does suggest old Taylor’s return, though.

I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.

Did you do anything wrong from your perspective in dealing with that phone call? Is there anything you regret?

The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.

The line being “. . . me and Taylor might still have sex”?

[Nods] And I was like, “OK, good. We’re back on good terms.” And then when I heard the song, I was like, “I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.” And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened. [West denied any involvement in Pusha-T’s revelation of Drake’s child and apologized for sending “negative energy” toward Drake.]

When did you get to the place that’s described on the opening track of Lover, “I Forgot That You Existed”?

It was sometime on the Reputation tour, which was the most transformative emotional experience of my career. That tour put me in the healthiest, most balanced place I’ve ever been. After that tour, bad stuff can happen to me, but it doesn’t level me anymore. The stuff that happened a couple of months ago with Scott [Borchetta] would have leveled me three years ago and silenced me. I would have been too afraid to speak up. Something about that tour made me disengage from some part of public perception I used to hang my entire identity on, which I now know is incredibly unhealthy.

What was the actual revelation?

It’s almost like I feel more clear about the fact that my job is to be an entertainer. It’s not like this massive thing that sometimes my brain makes it into, and sometimes the media makes it into, where we’re all on this battlefield and everyone’s gonna die except one person, who wins. It’s like, “No, do you know what? Katy is going to be legendary. Gaga is going to be legendary. Beyoncé is going to be legendary. Rihanna is going to be legendary. Because the work that they made completely overshadows the myopia of this 24-hour news cycle of clickbait.” And somehow I realized that on tour, as I was looking at people’s faces. We’re just entertaining people, and it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s interesting to look at these albums as a trilogy. 1989 was really a reset button.

Oh, in every way. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that that decision was mine and mine alone, and it was definitely met with a lot of resistance. Internally.

After realizing that things were not all smiles with your former label boss, Scott Borchetta, it’s hard not to wonder how much additional conflict there was over things like that.

A lot of the best things I ever did creatively were things that I had to really fight — and I mean aggressively fight — to have happen. But, you know, I’m not like him, making crazy, petty accusations about the past. . . . When you have a business relationship with someone for 15 years, there are going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But I truly, legitimately thought he looked at me as the daughter he never had. And so even though we had a lot of really bad times and creative differences, I was going to hang my hat on the good stuff. I wanted to be friends with him. I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me, just because it felt like it was family. To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of “Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.”

He accused you of declining the Parkland march and Manchester benefit show.

Unbelievable. Here’s the thing: Everyone in my team knew if Scooter Braun brings us something, do not bring it to me. The fact that those two are in business together after the things he said about Scooter Braun — it’s really hard to shock me. And this was utterly shocking. These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.

In some ways, on a musical level, Lover feels like the most indie-ish of your albums.

That’s amazing, thank you. It’s definitely a quirky record. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments — older in terms of when I used to use them. Because when I was making 1989, I was so obsessed with it being this concept of Eighties big pop, whether it was Eighties in its production or Eighties in its nature, just having these big choruses — being unapologetically big. And then Reputation, there was a reason why I had it all in lowercase. I felt like it wasn’t unapologetically commercial. It’s weird, because that is the album that took the most amount of explanation, and yet it’s the one I didn’t talk about. In the Reputation secret sessions I kind of had to explain to my fans, “I know we’re doing a new thing here that I’d never done before.” I’d never played with characters before. For a lot of pop stars, that’s a really fun trick, where they’re like, “This is my alter ego.” I had never played with that before. It’s really fun. And it was just so fun to play with on tour — the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.

RS1332Taylor SwiftPhotograph by by Erik Madigan Heck for Rolling Stone

Photograph by by Erik Madigan Heck for Rolling Stone.

Dress by Louis Vuitton. Earrings by Jessica McCormack

“Daylight” is a beautiful song. It feels like it could have been the title track.

It almost was. I thought it might be a little bit too sentimental.

And I guess maybe too on-the-nose.

Right, yeah, way too on-the-nose. That’s what I thought, because I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept. That’s why “You Need to Calm Down” can make sense within the theme of the album — one of the things it addresses is how certain people are not allowed to live their lives without discrimination just based on who they love.

Sometimes I’ll have a strange sort of fantasy of where the songs would be played. And so for songs like “Paper Rings” or “Lover” I was imagining a wedding-reception band, but in the Seventies, so they couldn’t play instruments that wouldn’t have been invented yet. I have all these visuals. For Reputation, it was nighttime cityscape. I didn’t really want any — or very minimal — traditional acoustic instruments. I imagined old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery. So I wanted the production to have nothing wooden. There’s no wood floors on that album. Lover is, like, completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.

How did you come to use high school metaphors to touch on politics with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”?

There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

I feel like your Fall Out Boy fandom might’ve slipped out in that title.

I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”

You sing about “American stories burning before me.” Do you mean the illusions of what America is?

It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific.

I don’t think they do anymore. Yeah, that was jarring, and I didn’t hear about that until after it had happened. Because at this point, I, for a very long time, I didn’t have the internet on my phone, and my team and my family were really worried about me because I was not in a good place. And there was a lot of stuff that they just dealt with without telling me about it. Which is the only time that’s ever happened in my career. I’m always in the pilot seat, trying to fly the plane that is my career in exactly the direction I want to take it. But there was a time when I just had to throw my hands up and say, “Guys, I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you to just take over for me and I’m just going to disappear.”

Are you referring to when a white-supremacist site suggested you were on their team?

I didn’t even see that, but, like, if that happened, that’s just disgusting. There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.

You took a lot of heat for not getting involved. Does any part of you regret that you just didn’t say “fuck it” and gotten more specific when you said to vote that November?

Totally. Yeah, I regret a lot of things all the time. It’s like a daily ritual.

Were you just convinced that it would backfire?

That’s literally what it was. Yeah. It’s a very powerful thing when you legitimately feel like numbers have proven that pretty much everyone hates you. Like, quantifiably. That’s not me being dramatic. And you know that.

There were a lot of people in those stadiums.

It’s true. But that was two years later. . . . I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

Here’s a hard question for you: As a superfan, what did you think of the Game of Thrones finale?

Oh, my God. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. So, clinically our brain responds to our favorite show ending the same way we feel when a breakup occurs. I read that. There’s no good way for it to end. No matter what would have happened in that finale, people still would have been really upset because of the fact that it’s over.

I was glad to see you confirm that your line about a “list of names” was a reference to Arya.

I like to be influenced by movies and shows and books and stuff. I love to write about a character dynamic. And not all of my life is going to be as kind of complex as these intricate webs of characters on TV shows and movies.

There was a time when it was.

That’s amazing.

But is the idea that as your own life becomes less dramatic, you’ll need to pull ideas from other places?

I don’t feel like that yet. I think I might feel like that possibly when I have a family. If I have a family. [Pauses] I don’t know why I said that! But that’s what I’ve heard from other artists, that they were very protective of their personal life, so they had to draw inspiration from other things. But again, I don’t know why I said that. Because I don’t know how my life is going to go or what I’m going to do. But right now, I feel like it’s easier for me to write than it ever was.

You don’t talk about your relationship, but you’ll sing about it in wildly revealing detail. What’s the difference for you?

Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling. . . . There is that weird conflict in being a confessional songwriter and then also having my life, you know, 10 years ago, be catapulted into this strange pop-culture thing.

I’ve heard you say that people got too interested in which song was about who, which I can understand — at the same time, to be fair, it was a game you played into, wasn’t it?

I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless. So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy. But at the same time, writing songs has never been a strategic element of my career. But I’m not scared anymore to say that other things in my career, like how to market an album, are strictly strategic. And I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to. And so I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business. But, it’s a different part of my brain than I use to write.

You’ve been masterminding your business since you were a teenager.

Yeah, but I’ve also tried very hard — and this is one thing I regret — to convince people that I wasn’t the one holding the puppet strings of my marketing existence, or the fact that I sit in a conference room several times a week and come up with these ideas. I felt for a very long time that people don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident. We’re all forced to kind of be like, “Aw, shucks, this happened again! We’re still doing well! Aw, that’s so great.” Alex Morgan celebrating scoring a goal at the World Cup and getting shit for it is a perfect example of why we’re not allowed to flaunt or celebrate, or reveal that, like, “Oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this stuff.” I think it’s really unfair. People love new female artists so much because they’re able to explain that woman’s success. There’s an easy trajectory. Look at the Game of Thrones finale. I specifically really related to Daenerys’ storyline because for me it portrayed that it is a lot easier for a woman to attain power than to maintain it.

I mean, she did murder . . .

It’s a total metaphor! Like, obviously I didn’t want Daenerys to become that kind of character, but in taking away what I chose to take away from it, I thought maybe they’re trying to portray her climbing the ladder to the top was a lot easier than maintaining it, because for me, the times when I felt like I was going insane was when I was trying to maintain my career in the same way that I ascended. It’s easier to get power than to keep it. It’s easier to get acclaim than to keep it. It’s easier to get attention than to keep it.

Well, I guess we should be glad you didn’t have a dragon in 2016. . . .

[Fiercely] I told you I don’t like that she did that! But, I mean, watching the show, though, maybe this is a reflection on how we treat women in power, how we are totally going to conspire against them and tear at them until they feel this — this insane shift, where you wonder, like, “What changed?” And I’ve had that happen, like, 60 times in my career where I’m like, “OK, you liked me last year, what changed? I guess I’ll change so I can keep entertaining you guys.”

Yeah, that’s definitely very perceptive of you. And the question posed to me is, if you kept trying to do good things, but everyone saw those things in a cynical way and assumed them to be done with bad motivation and bad intent, would you still do good things, even though nothing that you did was looked at as good? And the answer is, yes. Criticism that’s constructive is helpful to my character growth. Baseless criticism is stuff I’ve got to toss out now.

That sounds healthy. Is this therapy talking or is this just experience?

No, I’ve never been to therapy. I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly. There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.

I somehow connect all this to the lyric in “Daylight,” the idea of “so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven” — it’s a different kind of confession.

I am really glad you liked that line, because that’s something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it. I told the fans last night that sometimes on my bad days, I feel like my life is a pile of crap accumulated of only the bad headlines or the bad things that have happened, or the mistakes I’ve made or clichés or rumors or things that people think about me or have thought for the last 15 years. And that was part of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, where I had a pile of literal old selves fighting each other.

To be Mr. “Rolling Stone” for a second, there’s a Springsteen lyric, “Ain’t no one leaving this world, buddy/Without their shirttail dirty or hands a little bloody.”

That’s really good! No one gets through it unscathed. No one gets through in one piece. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. I know it was hard for me, because I kind of grew up thinking, “If I’m nice, and if I try to do the right thing, you know, maybe I can just, like, ace this whole thing.” And it turns out I can’t.

It’s interesting to look at “I Did Something Bad” in this context.

You pointing that out is really interesting because it’s something I’ve had to reconcile within myself in the last couple of years — that sort of “good” complex. Because from the time I was a kid I’d try to be kind, be a good person. Try really hard. But you get walked all over sometimes. And how do you respond to being walked all over? You can’t just sit there and eat your salad and let it happen. “I Did Something Bad” was about doing something that was so against what I would usually do. Katy [Perry] and I were talking about our signs. . . . [Laughs] Of course we were.

That’s the greatest sentence ever.

[Laughs] I hate you. We were talking about our signs because we had this really, really long talk when we were reconnecting and stuff. And I remember in the long talk, she was like, “If we had one glass of white wine right now, we’d both be crying.” Because we were drinking tea. We’ve had some really good conversations.

You could end up gaslighting yourself.

Yeah, for sure. ’Cause so many situations where if I would have said the first thing that came to my mind, people would have been like, “Whoa!” And maybe I would have been wrong or combative. So a couple of years ago I started working on actually just responding to my emotions in a quicker fashion. And it’s really helped with stuff. It’s helped so much because sometimes you get in arguments. But conflict in the moment is so much better than combat after the fact.

Well, thanks.

I do feel like I just did a therapy session. As someone who’s never been to therapy, I can safely say that was the best therapy session.

#taylor swift #swifties #lover #rolling stone #taylornation

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thehighlandhealer · 7 years

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Nothing but Dead Ends || Bronwyn, Vincent, & Charles

Charles: He paced the floor of his study, inexplicably nervous. It hadn't taken him very long to talk himself down from his panic after the encounter he privately dubbed 'The Atlas Fiasco'. Charles Xavier was a man of action; wallowing did not become him.

Still, one's boyfriend changing species and losing his memory was a bear of a problem to tackle. He'd scoured a mate's preternatural library for answers and, finding none, had immediately sought out the next course of action. Who knew real life had a phone-a-friend option?

He'd been quick to scrounge up the number Mason'd had the foresight to give him, but actually making the call was proving to be a mite more difficult. "Nothing for it but to take the plunge, old man," he muttered to himself, pressing 'call' before his fear could get the better of him. He would exhaust all resources.

Bronwyn: "Ye need to move them, the sunflowers are castin' too much shade, stealin' all the light," said Bronwyn, adjusting the hat on her head. She and Callum had spent a lovely morning playing in the dirt, and her cousin's garden was all the more beautiful for it.

Eden had nothing on a Druid's garden.

Callum contemplated his nasturtiums. "I've been meanin' to but I can't decide where to put them."

Bronwyn looked around. "How about.....there?" She pointed at a bed lined with begonias just as her phone rang. One glance at the display had lead pooling in her stomach. There was only one reason she would be receiving this call. "Mind if I take this?"

"No' at all."

Bronwyn stepped into the house before she answered. "Charles? What's wrong?"

Charles: "Hello to you as well, Bronwyn. Lovely to hear your voice," he teased, though anyone that knew him could detect the thread of anxiety weaved into his charm. It was possible that the restless clacking of pen against desk was audible as well. Charles was not in a good place, but manners make the man.

"I must confess, I did phone for something more pressing than small talk. I'm... When was the last time you heard from Mason?"

Bronwyn: Under normal circumstances she would've gone through the motions and made small talk with Charles, but under normal circumstances she also wouldn't have this bad feeling in her gut.

"When he texted me and told me he was about to do somethin' extreme and asked me to understand."

Charles: "Well." How to best to share what he knew? Charles was already taking meddling to its extreme by calling on Mason's friends for help. Did he have any right at all to share the would-be demon's secrets?

The answer may have been 'no', but the ache in his chest would not be soothed until a solution was found. Best to spill the truth quickly and efficiently. They'd officially reached Band-Aid territory.

"Extreme is putting it lightly," he began, grave despite his earlier efforts to be otherwise. "I don't know how much he told you about his plans, but the goal was to erase all memory of his so- of his past, so that he could have a slightly more bearable eternity. I told him it was a terrible idea, but those eyes. I couldn't deny him the right to pursue happiness. Needless to say, it did not go well. I hadn't heard from him in too long, so I popped by for a visit."

He needed to stop babbling and get to the point.

"Mason is human and remembers nothing of his past life."

There. Band-Aid.

"There must be something we can do. I'm... I can't lose him this way."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn's only thought when Charles finished speaking was, 'Oh, Mason.'

Mason, Mason, Mason, what on earth have you done? How could you have been so breathtakingly reckless messing with something as fragile and fickle as memory?

She sank into the nearest chair and was silent for a long time. Charles might think the call had cut off except for the sighing that could be heard clearly over the line.

Charles: Charles was ever so grateful for the limits of phone calls as his lip began to wobble, careful composure cracking for the second time since he'd met that stranger. He kept himself quiet. A calm façade that only distance allowed.

"I'm so sorry," he breathed, when he was certain his voice would crack. "I'm so, so sorry."

Bronwyn: "I'm sorry, too," Bronwyn said softly. "The loss isn't only mine or only his." Or only Callum's. "It's yers as well. Ye love him."

Charles: "More than I can say," he agreed. A wave of exhaustion days in the making crashed over him and he collapsed into the chair behind his desk, rubbing at his eyes. "Is there anything to be done?"

Bronwyn: "I don't know. I'd have to do some diggin', find out exactly what he did or who he went to and dig some more. But whatever happened here, I think it's safe to say this wasn't the intended result. From what ye're tellin' me, he wanted to strike a few things from the slate, no' wipe it clean."

Charles: "That's what he told me. I trust that he wouldn't want me gone completely; it's why I felt justified in calling in reinforcements." A brief pause. "Is there anything I can do to help? Anything at all?"

If there was one thing Charles Francis Xavier hated, it was feeling useless.

Bronwyn: "If ye hadn't, I would have. When he sent me that text he told me to contact ye if somethin' went wrong. I didn't want to believe somethin' had but here we are..."

Bronwyn heaved a long sigh. "I don't know. I hate that that's the only answer I have."

Charles: "Oh." Full of surprises, that demon of his. The chunk of ice lodged where his heart should be thawed the smallest bit at the knowledge. "I don't know how he believed I might help the situation."

There was that pen again, tapping thoughtfully away at polished mahogany. "I suppose I could do more reading on my own end. I haven't found anything thus far, but I can't imagine sitting idly by while he's... Anything you think you might need, yeah? I'll be there. Nothing is too large or small."

Bronwyn: "He probably thought that between the two of us we could resolve whatever it was he was worried would go wrong." Bronwyn could only hope Mason's faith hadn't been misplaced. How ever many amazing things she was able to do, her power had limits, and those limits tended to rear their heads at the most inconvenient of times.

"Actually, I do need somethin'. I need ye to tell me ev'ry detail ye can remember about this new Mason. Ev'ry single one, even the ones that don't feel important in the grand scheme."

Charles: "Oh." A beat. "Oh, all right."

Charles had never once been more grateful for his eidetic memory. Pen still tapping out a jittery little samba, he dragged the incident to the forefront of his mind.

"From what I could tell, the house remained unchanged. I wasn't given free rein to go exploring, of course, but nothing I could see was out of the ordinary. Mason..."

He inhaled shakily. As far as memories to relive went, this one was hardly going to make the highlight reel.

"He looked enough like himself for me to believe that he was himself, but there were subtle differences. He'd shaved, for one, and he'd gotten his hair cut. That should have been a red flag, though I thought he only wanted a change of pace... He wasn't as impeccably dressed as he usually is, either. That may have had more to do with the fact that he'd obviously been sleeping, but I can't be certain of anything in this situation.

He mentioned parents. Both dead. His mother more recently. He told me that was why he was in North Carolina to begin with; he'd inherited the house. He said that he'd grown up there, but he'd been living in Louisiana, which is where most of his friends were. Are? I didn't catch any names."

He swallowed past a viscous lump of bile and plowed on. God, why couldn't he let this go.

"He'd been to see someone.... And apparently his visit and inspired a similar reaction to my own. Someone named Callum? What else? What. Else. Oh! And he was sporting a tattoo that I'd never seen before. Just below his neck. Some-- some sort of symbol. It wasn't one I recognized, but I could probably draw a rough sketch of it from memory. I was a bit too preoccupied to ask him anything about it."

That was all he had. He could only hope something would be of use. "His name was Lawrence. Lawrence Atlas."

Bronwyn: Rather than clear things up a little, Charles' tale just confused and concerned her more. It was one thing to have no memories of your life. After all, hundreds of people got amnesia every year. It wasn't an ideal condition but at least it had a name and a cause.

But having entirely different memories to replace the ones you'd lived through and suddenly changing species? Suddenly having a different first name but the same surname?

That was a horse of a different color.

Bronwyn rubbed her forehead. She could feel a perfectly vicious headache coming on.

"I haven't seen him shirtless all that often but I don't remember him havin' a tattoo. Might be somethin' there. As for the visit with Callum..." She sighed. "I heard about it. Callum's my cousin. I'm actually visitin' him at the moment."

Charles: "It's new," he assured, before he could reflect on the implication of such a hasty response. All at once, he was grateful for their distance. She couldn't see how red his face had gotten from... wherever she was.

"Oh." Cousins? Had Mason mentioned that? Not as far as Charles could recall, and he wasn't in the habit of memory suppression. He couldn't be sure just what this new scrap of information made him feel. "I see. Well, I hope he's all right. I know that seeing him was difficult for me. I can only imagine..."

Bronwyn: The implication flew right over Bronwyn's head; it was taken with more pressing matters than why Charles was able to clarify that point with such certainty.

"Maybe I'm graspin' at straws here, but I think this new Mason havin' a tattoo that our Mason doesn't means somethin'. Draw me that sketch. I'll see if I can dig anythin' up."

"He's fine now," Bronwyn said carefully. She didn't know if Charles knew about the soulmate thing, so she thought it best to proceed with caution and be as casual as possible. "It was a shock, though. It's hard to prepare for somethin' like that."

Charles: Charles knew. Of course he knew. But he wasn't about to broach the subject now. Or ever, most likely. He couldn't quite manage to be in denial about Mason's cosmic life-partner, but he'd keep it under lock and key until he was forced to face it. "Good. Good, I'm glad to hear it."

A soft rustle of paper accompanied his pleasantries, the professor digging about for a scrap of paper to begin his sketch. The sooner they sorted this mess out, the better. "Anyway, you're probably right about the tattoo bit. I'll draw up a likeness right this very moment."

Bronwyn: "I appreciate that, thank ye. It might be nothin', but we have to turn over all the rocks." After a few moments she added, very gently, "How are ye doin', Charles? Really, how are ye doin'?"

As she'd said before, it wasn't just her loss. It was his, too, and in a lot of ways it cut him more deeply. He was in love with Mason, after all.

Charles: "I've been better, Bronwyn, I must admit," he sighed, dragging his free hand through his hair and leaving it as disarranged as he felt. "I miss him. Terribly, awfully, dreadfully. I just want him back."

With gentle clearing of his throat, he collected himself and put the final touches on his sketch. "There. I think that's it, more or less. God, I hope it's of use." Now how was he going to get it to her?

"I could bring it by yours? Perhaps sending a photo would be easier? Whichever you'd prefer."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn's heart hurt for him. She knew what it was to lose someone you were deeply in love with, but her loss wasn't the same as his. Ian MacGregor was still himself even if he wasn't with her. "We'll get him back, Charles. I don't know how we're goin' to do it or how long it's goin' to take, but we'll get him back. I promise."

"It has to be. I'd like to think it wouldn't have appeared on his skin otherwise." She glanced out the window, saw Callum gently digging up plants. "I leave that entirely up to ye. Whatever would be easiest and make ye the most comfortable."

Charles: Charles allowed that gentle promise to soothe him. The man was nothing if not optimistic, and if Bronwyn was confident, he was more than happy to feed off of that.

"I'll pop over, then." His enthusiasm had little to do with necessity. He only wanted to feel useful. As if he was doing something. A concrete plan set in motion to reach a goal. Even with Bronwyn's assurances, Charles would go mad if he was forced to sit and stew in his own worries. "I've got a free moment. Where do you live?"

Distance was no object when one housed mutants that could travel hundreds of miles in an instant.

Bronwyn: Since she was going to be staying there for the next little while, Bronwyn gave Charles Callum's address. It wasn't the most ideal situation, but she could hardly ask Vincent to teleport her to New Orleans just so Mason's boyfriend wouldn't meet the reincarnation of his dead wife. It would only delay the inevitable.

"My cousin's out working in the garden at the moment. If you don't feel comfortable with him here, I know somewhere where we can go to talk this out."

Charles: "Oh, no, no, no, darling. That's perfectly all right." Of course, Charles couldn't possibly know that the cousin in question was none other than the infamous soul mate. Mason hadn't been particularly forthcoming with that scrap of information.

"I'll see you soon," he promised, bright with this newfound purpose, before clicking off.

It was the work of ten minutes to type the address into Google Maps and have Kurt examine the area. Thank heaven for satellites. In no time at all, he was waving away a cloud of sulfur, nodding to the handsome fellow in the front garden, and tidying himself as best as possible.

His rap on the door was quick and efficient.

Bronwyn: Just as oblivious as Charles was, Callum felt only mild curiosity as he watched the strange man go up to his front door, smiling and waving in greeting before continuing with his work. Guy was probably a guest of Bronwyn's. It never ceased to amaze him how many acquaintances his cousin could make.

Bronwyn, on the other hand, was a bundle of nerves. She really wished she knew how much Mason had told Charles about Callum and vice versa. She could ask them herself, but she didn't want to bring them up to each other in that sense. It would only make this whole situation worse.

Better to avoid soulmate talk altogether, she thought as she went to answer the door.

"Well hello there, Charles. Come in."

Charles: Charles' greeting smile was broad and charming, masking a fair bit of worry. There was something uniquely satisfying about being active however.

He crossed the threshold, giving the space a politely curious once-over before offering Bronwyn the full force of that smile. "Bronwyn. It's so very lovely to see you again."

To his merit, this was true enough. He admittedly wished that they were meeting under better circumstances, but he'd been nothing short of charmed by their last interaction.

"Beautiful home you've got here. The garden is spectacular. Did you want my sketch straight off?"

Regardless of her answer, he was already slipping a hand into his jacket to retrieve it.

Bronwyn: "It's lovely to see ye as well," she said, offering him a smile in return. The smile hid enough that if she didn't know better, she would never have guessed something was wrong. That would probably work to their advantage what with Callum so close by.

"It's my cousin's place, but yes it is. He's put his blood, sweat, and tears into makin' this house what it is." Bronwyn nodded. "Might as well. There's no pressin' danger but I'd still feel better if we got this mess figured out as quickly as possible."

Charles: "Oh?" Charles tossed a quick glance through the doorway, but he couldn't see Handsome Waving Fellow from his vantage.

"Was that him I saw toiling away in the garden? His work's certainly paid off. It puts the Institute's to shame. I only hope he doesn't mind that I invited myself over."

The corners of his mouth tilted up in a weak little smile. Charles was in total agreement. The man that would be Mason seemed in perfectly good health, but the matter still felt pressing to the telepath. Ah, love.

"Well, here you are," he nodded, holding out a bit of school stationary folded neatly in two. "Is the symbol one you recognize? I've never seen anything like it before."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn nodded. "Aye, that's him. He's doin' some maintenance and rearrangin' out there. Some of the flowers aren't as happy as they could be."

He won't mind as long as he has no idea who you are, she thought before waving the matter aside. "He won't. He'll be out there for hours putterin' away."

Bronwyn took the paper and studied the symbol Charles had drawn, brow furrowed. "I can't say that I do. And yet..." She rotated the paper left and right, studying it for a few long moments. Had she seen this before? Surely not. She'd have done research if she had. "I could swear it looks vaguely familiar but I can't for the life o' me figure out why. Ye said this was tattooed on him?"

Charles: "Admirable dedication." He caught wind of that last thought, however unintentionally, and his eyebrow quirked in curiosity. He thought it better not to ask, though. Now wasn't the time. "Good. I'm glad to hear it."

"Mm," he agreed, studying her expression rather than the drawing itself. "Just here." His fingers brushed lightly over his own clavicle, where it was hidden beneath pressed cotton. "The human mind is a remarkable thing. It recalls more than we can consciously know. Perhaps you've seen it in passing? A book?"

Bronwyn: "Aye, perhaps. It looks similar to some ancient Irish Celtic symbols I've seen." Bronwyn studied it for a few more moments before nodding to herself. "I suppose that's as good a start as any. Come, we'll comb through my cousin's library, see what we can find." If they couldn't find anything (Callum's books dealt mostly with plants and growing), she'd ask Vincent to pop over to her library in New Orleans and maybe the one back in Montana too.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to offer ye somethin'. Would ye like somethin' to eat or drink?"

Charles: Finally. Something to do. Steps to take that would lead to a solution, or at the very least rule out certain possibilities. He grinned broadly, something grateful glinting in his eyes, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides with renewed energy. "Brilliant. Lead the way." Scouring through old texts was something he was good at.

"Oh, thank you, no." He declined the offer with a smile and a brief shake of the head. Charles doubted he could eat anything, at the moment. "I'm quite all right."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn couldn't help but smile back; he just looked so relieved. It made her wonder just how much time he'd spent trying to figure out a way to fix it and how frustrated he must have been to keep coming up with nothing. She knew the feeling well.

She nodded as she led him into the small room tucked away at the back of the house's second floor, where there were as many books on the floor and table as there were on the shelves. "Sorry about the mess. I've been workin' on somethin' of a side project and haven't had much luck yet. Now let's see..."

After careful scanning, Bronwyn selected four books as starting points, all dealing with Irish Celtic lore. She handed two to Charles. "Based on what I know, there are two reasons he'd have the mark; a spell or a creature."

Charles: "Oh, no, no. Please don't apologise. At least not until you've seen the disaster area that is my study." His gently self-deprecating chuckle was well earned. He'd really only been mildly hyperbolic. He did his best thinking when everything to consider was spread out before him.

The telepath fell to immediately, peeling open the topmost book with an almost reverent sort of care. He divided his attention neatly in two, eyes scanning the first page and ears still pricked to all Bronwyn was saying. Spell-work he was passingly familiar with, but... "Creature? What sort of creature?"

Bronwyn: "The ancient and powerful sort," said Bronwyn, cracking open her own book. "There are some creatures whose magic is so powerful that it leaves a physical mark on whoever is affected by it. It can be a burn, a scar, or in some cases, a tattoo. Sometimes it can even be a sort o' bond."

Charles: "Ah." Charles had a muddy sort of understanding. There was so much about this world just beyond his world that was inconceivable. Now, apparently, there were ancient powerful beings that could alter the very fabric of someone's reality. Fantastic. He continued to flip through pages, hoping that the gravity of all that he didn't know or understand wasn't plain in his face.

"A bond between the creature and the person? Or the person and another person?"

Bronwyn: "Between the creature and the person. No' a romantic one mind ye--although I'm sure that happens ev'ry now and then. A bond of servitude, of debt, of any number of unpleasant things. And as long as that mark remains, so too does the bond."

Charles: At those words something ice cold and unpleasantly slick worked its way down his spine. He shuddered, swallowed hard, and turned a page with a bit more force than was strictly necessary. His voice, surprisingly enough, was steady when he spoke next. "Debt... Is there any way to remove the mark without harming the host? Aside from the general unpleasantness that would be laser-surgery, I mean."

Bronwyn: "I'm no' sure," said Bronwyn, scanning through a list of ancient symbols. "Magic can only be altered or overridden with more magic, but there are some types that are stronger than others. But even if we could remove the mark, I don't know if that would sever any potential bond. We'd have to know exactly what the mark is to know if it's just a symbol or if is the bond, if that makes sense."

Charles: "It does." Frustration tugged at the corners of his mouth. It did not dampen his determination, however, and he scanned through pages with a stiff efficiency. He'd finished off the first, the second, with nothing to show for it. He was nearly through the third before he spoke again. "Are there any more that might be useful?"

Bronwyn: Having come up just as empty-handed as Charles, Bronwyn went back to the bookshelf and got them some more material. There hadn't been anything in any of the books on Irish Celtic lore, so she branched out into other regions and religions.

"Whatever else has changed, the fact that he lived in New Orleans has stayed the same," she said as she handed Charles a small stack of books. "That makes me wonder if whatever happened to him could've happened there. Lots o' voodoo and hoodoo in those parts."

Charles: "Mm. That's certainly a possibility." It seemed to Charles that nearly anything was a possibility in this hidden world of demons and curses. With nothing off-limits, they had a hell of a lot to sift through. It was not a comforting thought.

He smiled, faint but grateful, and set the pile of books nearby to continue his scouring. "I have a necromancer friend who lives in New Orleans. She owns a bookstore. I certainly wouldn't say no to a trip. Just to see what there is to dig up." After this, of course. After he'd exhausted every page of every suitable book in the place.

Bronwyn: Times like these, Bronwyn really missed her library back in Ronan. That house and pretty much everything in it had been designed with one goal in mind: to help hunters. It hadn't started out that way, but that was the way it had ended up.

Hell, she'd even managed to find a medical supply company that would sell to her!

"Definitely an option for us to keep in mind. I actually have a friend down there who's a hoodoo priestess. She might be willin' to help us out, too."

Charles: "Perhaps we should plan a trip in the immediate future." His tone was gently amused, but Charles put a mental pin in the idea to examine later. For the time being, it was best to exhaust all possibilities here. Plan A before Plan B, and all that.

He paused in his flipping, finger poised on a swirling, black mark that resembled Lawrence's tattoo. It wasn't the same mark --Charles' memory was photo-accurate-- but it did bear a slight resemblance. It was probably nothing, but there was no harm in trying.

"Does this mean anything to you?" he asked, tapping at the illustration in question.

Bronwyn: "Ye're more than welcome to visit," said Bronwyn, smile matching Charles' tone. "I live there, remember? I already have a pretty good idea of where all the places that might help us are."

She leaned over to get a look at the page Charles was pointing at. "Huh. That looks vaguely familiar. Does it say what creature or spell it belongs to?"

Charles: "Mm. Djinn." He chewed on the unfamiliar word, tapping out the syllables against thin paper. "Dee-jin? Die-jin? Jin? Whatever it is I've never heard of it." With the admission, he pushed the book across for Bronwyn to get a better look. And though it wasn't his intention, his eyes were faintly pleading when he finally tore them away from the pages. "Have you?"

Bronwyn: "Jin," Bronwyn confirmed, studying the page more closely. Maybe they were finally starting to get somewhere.

"As a matter of fact, I have. My brothers ran into one a few years ago. Djinn are basically genies. They grant yer dearest wishes but never the way ye think they are. Some species of djinn send ye into a perfect dream state while they drain ye of blood. Others are more trickster-like, givin' ye what ye want but havin' it bite ye in the ass."

Charles: There was nothing to be done for it; his pulse began to hammer, like his heart was trying to slam its way out of his ribcage. Hope is a dangerous weapon. "Yeah?" he breathed, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. "Do you think that warrants further exploration?"

A shudder ran through him, unbidden, as the truth of Bronwyn's explanation settled over him. "Your brothers... did they-- What was the outcome of their experience? Is there any way to stop it? If we're even dealing with a djinn, I mean."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn looked between the symbol on the page and the one Charles had drawn and considered. They were incredibly similar. "I think we would be remiss no' to."

"Things turned out verra well for them, and aye. Djinn can be killed."

Charles: Charles paled, if only slightly, casting his gaze down toward the swirling symbols. Killed. A dangerous word, to be sure. It filled him with a sense of dread that he quickly buried. Perhaps murder wasn't the only way to rescue his Mason. He'd consider his options once they'd formulated a plan. "Good. Good. That's a relief to hear. So... where do we start?"

Bronwyn: "Ideally by goin' to Mason and askin' him if he's been associatin' with any suspicious characters but in lieu of that, we need to go down to New Orleans. Even if it is a djinn and no' some sort of curse, my friend Marie's input could be verra valuable."

Charles: "Sounds reasonable." Charles nodded, trying not to seem as eager as he was. He was ready to leave right that very instant, no preparation necessary. But there was a scrap of sanity left in him yet, and he knew better than to assume a grown person could drop everything to go on a man hunt. Monster hunt? "When would you like to go?"

Bronwyn: "As soon as ye're ready," said Bronwyn. This entire situation made her uneasy; she didn't want to be without answers any longer than she had to be.

Whatever had cast that curse, Mason was soon going to be free of it. She and Charles would make sure of it.

Charles: "I'm ready, now." Perhaps he sounded a mite overeager, but Charles wanted answers just as badly and a solution most of all. He'd shoot a text message to one of the teachers before too long, but he was as ready as he'd ever be. He carried his greatest weapon with him wherever he went. "How are we traveling?"

Bronwyn: The man certainly didn't waste any time. Definitely an asset in a situation like this. "All right, then. I have tons of frequent flier miles so I can get us on the first flight out, or we could go with a more....magical, non-traditional method o' transportation."

Charles: One corner of his mouth twitched into a wry grin. Charles was good with non-traditional. After all, he'd arrived by teleporter and his best friend specialized in wormholes. "Non-traditional is all right with me. The less time we waste, the better, as far as I'm concerned."

Bronwyn: "Verra well then, give me just one moment." Rather than make a phone call or go fetch someone, Bronwyn merely closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

She was concentrating on her connection with her familiar, calling him to her side with her thoughts.

Vincent: It was as instantaneous as always, appearing in a blink on his mistress' shoulder in his jackdaw form. His feathers ruffled, eyes on the man in front of his druid.

"Ma'am?"

Bronwyn: Vincent was given a nuzzle in greeting. "Hello, love." She turned to Charles. "Charles, this is Vincent. He's my familiar. Vincent, this is Charles. He's a friend. We're undertakin' a task we could use yer help with."

Vincent: "Pleasure, Sir Charles." He would have smiled if he could. His feathers began to smooth. "How can I be of service?"

Charles: For all that he considered himself well-prepared for the strange and preternatural, Charles started when the bird made its appearance, a burst of feathers from one blink of blue eyes to the next. If time with Wynter and Mason had taught him nothing else, however, it was composure. He quickly regained his and offered the creature a smile, not a hint of bemusement at its ability to speak. "I assure you, Vincent, the pleasure is all mine. I believe that Bronwyn here can explain our predicament best."

Bronwyn: "Do ye think ye could transport us both home to New Orleans? A friend of ours is in some kind o' trouble and we need to find information on how to save him."

Vincent: "Yes, ma'am, of course. One moment." The bird fluttered from his mistress' shoulder. Standing pretty to her right, the avian creature began to enlarge; what was a sharp and tiny beak elongated and curved to a prominent nose. Near five feet and six inches the feathers sank into his skin and faded altogether, replaced by clothing. It was what distinguished him from Fera, his ability to return to human form bereft of the hassle of nudity. He had been in his true form for days, which was why his transformation took seconds rather than a blink.

"Ah!" The familiar cracked his back and neck. "Hi!" he waved.

Charles: Transformations, at least, were something he was intimately familiar with, given his upbringing. Any reminder of his sister and her gift still brought a wistful smile to his face. He waved back, friendly despite his brief trip down memory lane. "Well! Hello there."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn always enjoyed seeing people's reactions to Vincent's transformation. For some it was wonder, others curiosity, and in some cases--like now--there was fondness.

"There he is," she said, smiling as she smoothed Vincent's hair. "Have ye eaten, love? Don't want ye makin' this journey with an empty stomach."

Vincent: "Just seeds and - and things." Bugs. Delicious bugs! That wasn't a proper dinner in this form. In fact, his stomach suddenly felt empty. "Do we need to go now, ma'am?"

Bronwyn: "I do believe we have enough time for ye to eat somethin'. Both o' ye," she added, looking to Charles. "We all need to be well-nourished for what lies ahead and it just so happens I made chicken earlier."

Vincent: "I'm...I'm fine. Really. I can make it for a trip." Perhaps, but his stomach did grumble in protest to this, loudly enough for the familiar to hug his torso to silence it.

Bronwyn: "Nonsense, ye're goin' to eat. If ye don't want chicken I can make somethin' else."

Charles: He hadn't so much as considered his own stomach since he'd arrived. They'd been working for quite some time, but he'd been... preoccupied. Perhaps it was better to adventure on a full stomach than an empty one. "Chicken sounds lovely," he smiled, nodding to Vincent in an effort to assure him that he did not mind the delay. "We have to keep up our strength, after all."

Vincent: "If it's alright by you, then it's alright by me," said the familiar. "I'll help in the kitchen!"

Bronwyn: "Excellent," said Bronwyn, gesturing for them to follow her to the kitchen. "I can make some lovely sandwiches or I can heat up the chicken and accompany it with some salad."

Vincent: "Sandwiches, please!" chimed her bird.

Charles: "Sandwiches are perfectly fine," Charles agreed, chuckling. "Can I help you with anything?" To say that the telepath was hopeless in the kitchen was a gross understatement, but sandwiches even he could manage.

Bronwyn: "Sandwiches it'll be then. And wouldn't ye know, I do believe I have some fries we can pop in the oven."

"Charles, I'll put ye in charge o' washin' and slicin' some tomatoes. Vincent, ye can butter and toast some bread. Sound good?"

Vincent: "Yes! This I can do - and I won't eat all of it, promise." Once in the kitchen, the familiar looked between the two. "So, what are we doing afterwards?"

Charles: The corner of his mouth tilted up in an amused little smirk. Charles had never had the self-restraint to make such a hefty promise. "I think I can manage that." He trailed behind to the kitchen and awaited further direction. "Straight to New Orleans?"

Bronwyn: "Good," Bronwyn chuckled, taking over the task of slicing the chicken. "Lightly buttered, mind ye."

She nodded. "Aye, straight to New Orleans. Once this is done I'll call Marie and tell her we're comin'. Wouldn't want to catch her completely unawares."

Vincent: "Will I need to do anything else for this person we're going to see? More spells?"

Bronwyn: "I don't think so. Although now that ye're here, I wonder if ye might recognize the symbol we're tryin' to decipher."

Charles: "Oh!" He hadn't even considered asking. Without a word, he scuttled off in search of the sketch and returned with paper outstretched. "Here it is. Bronwyn, where do you keep your knives?"

Vincent: "A symbol?" The sketch was taken from their guest and given a once-over. "It's very old, and...I feel like it's something from both worlds. My old one and this one."

Bronwyn: "They're in the drawer underneath the coffee maker. I keep tellin' Callum to get one o' those magnetic strips that mounts on the wall but he refuses to listen."

Bronwyn moved to stand beside her familiar, looking down at the symbol on the paper. "Have ye seen it’s like before? In this world or yer old one?"

Vincent: "Only near dry lands. Drawn on rocks, painted or etched on glass. Never actually seen the owner of it."

Bronwyn: "We're startin' to suspect it might belong to a djinn of some sort."

Vincent: "Well, djinn plus dry lands would fit the profile."

Charles: Charles listened intently as he rummaged through the drawer for what he hoped was a suitable knife. Dry land? Rocks? Glass? Did any of it hold any significance? The telepath couldn't begin to guess, but he trusted the experience of his new companions where his own fell short. In the meantime, he busied himself with washing and slicing the tomato. "Do djinn not like water?"

Vincent: "That's the rumor," Vincent smiled.

Charles: "Huh." He supposed it was true that you learned something new every day.

Bronwyn: "Well if that's really the case then New Orleans is an odd place for one o' them to set up shop. Then again," she sighed, going back to the chicken. "I suppose that isn't too much of a problem as long as he avoids the river."

Vincent: "And the hurricanes, and the normal rain...and the misty days."

Charles: "Not to mention the humidity. Spending a summer day in the French Quarter feels a bit like drowning."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn chuckled. "This djinn chose a verra poor place indeed to avoid water. What else do the two o' ye want on these sandwiches? Cheese, lettuce, pesto, mayo? Request to yer heart's content."

Vincent: "All of that and some tomato," said her familiar.

Charles: "That sounds brilliant," he beamed, proudly sliding a cutting board of nearly-evenly sliced tomato across the counter.

Bronwyn: "Ask and ye shall receive." Fries went in the oven and the rest of the sandwich components were taken from their respective homes.

Charles: "Is there anything else I can do?"

Bronwyn: "Keep an eye on the fries to make sure they don't burn. Callum's oven has a bit of an attitude."

Charles: "I think I can manage that." He flashed another smile and nodded before taking a seat.

Vincent: "So what are you?" Because his childlike curiosity trumped his filter.

Charles: "I--" Charles blinked. His skin was far too thick for such a question to bother him, but it had been quite some time since he'd been asked so boldly. "I'm a mutant. Telepath."

Vincent: Vincent looked to his mistress then. A mutant? What?

Bronwyn: "There's somethin' in mutant DNA that gives them abilities most don't have. Some read thoughts, some manipulate matter, some can shapeshift. Endless possibilities."

Vincent: "So humans that can do magic all the time?"

Charles: "Oh." It hadn't even occurred to him that someone might not know who they were. "Essentially, I suppose. Though perhaps we're more like magical creatures... It isn't something that we do, it's something that we are. It's in our blood."

Vincent: "Sounds like a magical creature. Sounds like me, and vampires, and - well, I guess no demons."

Charles: "Mm. Every one of us is different, has different abilities, but we're a community, more or less. I run a school, you know."

Vincent: "A community, the very thing humans don't normally like in this realm," Vincent mused.

Bronwyn: "They'd be beside themselves if they knew how many communities exist right under their noses."

Charles: "It took quite a bit of adjusting for me to come to terms with that as well," he laughed, dragging fingers through the chaos of his hair. "But I must say that I'm glad to have met all of the people that I have, yourselves included." A beat. "And Mason, of course."

Vincent: "Mason, the demon? Have I met him?"

Bronwyn: "I don't believe so, but I'm sure I've mentioned him to ye before."

Vincent: "Mhm. Some days just blend together."

Charles: "He's.... a uniquely brilliant individual. I only hope that you get a chance to meet him." He lost himself to his thoughts, for a time, fiddling with a loose thread of his jumper before the distinct smell of potato caught his attention. "I think the chips are done?"

Bronwyn: "He will," said Bronwyn, smiling reassuringly for all their benefits. "We're goin' to go to New Orleans and get some answers and restore Mason to himself. He'll be okay."

She nodded an handed him a pair of oven mits. "Aye, it smells like it. Just set the tray on the stove there."

Charles: Charles nodded, trying for a smile, and did as he was told. The chips smells delicious, but he no longer felt the least bit hungry. Still, he set the oven mitts aside and took a seat while the fries cooled. He'd eat for strength and courtesy, if nothing else.

Vincent: "So," the tension was bothering the bird, "what are we going to be doing in New Orleans to find whatever?"

Bronwyn: "We're goin' to be visitin' a friend of mine. Marie Lanoue. She's a hoodoo priestess and one o' the only people I can think of that would have detailed information about djinn. What's more, she'll know if that symbol can be found anywhere in New Orleans."

Vincent: "Good! We should be able to solve this before the weekend is out, right?"

Charles: "I certainly hope so," Charles nodded, letting Vincent's optimism fuel his own. Already, they'd gotten leagues beyond anything he could have discovered researching on his own. It paid to have friends in strange places. "What do you think, Bronwyn?"

Bronwyn: Bronwyn wished she could share their optimism. But since she couldn't, she was going to have to fake it until she did.

"I think Marie's our best shot at makin' it so. And if no' her, I know lots of other people that could give us answers. We're lousy with resources and we will figure this out and solve this."

Vincent: "It's not... life or death?"

Bronwyn: "No, nothin' like that. He's fine, he's healthy. He's just...no' himself."

Charles: "Not himself," Charles echoed, nicking a chip from the tray mostly for something to occupy his restless hands. It scalded his mouth as he popped it in, but he didn't so much as flinch. Certainly felt like life or death.

Vincent: "I've never heard of a situation like this before. How could it even happen?"

Bronwyn: "Djinn are verra powerful creatures. Some have the power to manipulate reality and I'm assumin' in Mason's case, people."

Charles: "And how does one go about defeating one of these very powerful creatures?"

Vincent: "Throw a bucket of water at them?"

Bronwyn: "I wish to god it was that simple. Maybe it will be and they'll melt like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, who knows."

Charles: "I wouldn't be surprised, honestly." He actually managed a laugh, and popped another fry into his mouth. "It seems to me that all the old fairy tales are true."

Vincent: "Did you think none of this existed before?"

Charles: "A long time ago, yes. Or what feels like a long time ago. It's all still very new to me."

Vincent: "Well, you're new to me," Vincent smiled.

Charles: "So I am," he chuckled. "I only hope I can make a good first impression. You know, for mutant-kind everywhere."

Vincent: "You're you, not the entirety," Vincent smiled.

Bronwyn: "If it makes ye feel any better, there are things that are new to us too," Bronwyn said to Charles, offering him a smile. "Human or non-human, none of us ever stop learnin'."

Charles: Charles returned the smile, eyes crinkling warmly at the corners. "How right you are."

Vincent: Vincent would have to be reminded to eat slower, wolfing down lunch in his excitement to begin their search for whatever information was going to lead them to success. Unless the conversation was food related, then he was staying out of it.

Bronwyn: "Can I get ye somethin' to drink, Charles?"

"Slowly, Vincent," said Bronwyn, turning to her familiar. "And smaller bites. I'd hate to break our streak of days gone without chokin'."

Charles: "A glass of water, please?" He smiled around a mouthful of tomato, keeping his lips closed in an attempt at being polite. His appetite was still nowhere to be found, but it was probably best not to leave on an empty stomach. "The sandwiches are delicious, Bronwyn. Thank you."

Vincent: "Sorry!" Vincent gasped. "Done." He was picking up crumbs at this point. "I'm ready when you guys are!" Excited to get this moving forward. Anytime there was a mystery to solve he was ecstatic.

Charles: Charles cocked an eyebrow at the man, lips twitching faintly with amusement. "Do you want to finish my chips?" he asked, plucking up the second half of his sandwich and sliding the mostly-full plate across the table. "I've been ready for weeks, my friend. I only wished I'd come to you sooner, Bronwyn. We've achieved more in a few hours than I have in a month on my own."

Bronwyn: Charles' water was fetched, her own meal attended to. She wasn't all that hungry either but as she'd told Charles and Vincent, it was best to undertake things like this on a full stomach.

Bronwyn shook her head fondly at her familiar before giving Charles a smile. "What's important is that ye're here now. We'll figure this out, whatever this is." She took a deep breath. "So we better go see what New Orleans has to offer."

Vincent: The familiar perked, several of Charles' chips crammed in his mouth. "Yesh!" crumbs making a break for it.

Bronwyn: "Vincent, we've talked about this too," said Bronwyn, getting up to clear their plates. "No talkin' with yer mouth full."

Vincent: "Sorry!" Yet he was still doing it, only now covering his mouth as he wolfed it down. "Ready when you two are."

Bronwyn: "I'm ready. Charles?"

Charles: He exhaled sharply and nodded, brushing nonexistent crumbs from his sweater. It was now or never, he supposed. "Ready as I'll ever be." A wry little smile and he was pulling back from the table to stand beside his companions.

Bronwyn: Bronwyn nodded. "All right. Take us away, Vincent."

Vincent: With a smile, the familiar offered his hands to his mistress and the professor. This would drain him, as always, but at least now there was fuel to burn through.

New Orleans was unexpectedly chilly on arrival; it was the kind of frigid cold that bit through skin to bone. The thunderstorm was to blame, and immediately Bronwyn's bird was whining.

"I don't like this!"

Charles: Years. Years of instantaneous travel and Charles found it no less unpleasant. Still, he was upright and mostly steady when the world swam into view again. His brow furrowed with concern when he registered Vincent's complaints. "Are you all right? Is there something I can do?"

Bronwyn: After a few days in the pleasantly chilly weather of Edenton, coming home to bitterly cold wind was like a slap in the face. "Och, Jesus bloody Christ it's freezin'."

She wrapped an arm around Vincent to give them both some warmth. "Come on ye two, let's get inside."

Vincent: Like a bird - or in this case, a dog - Vincent was shaking off the wet as soon as they were in the foyer. "Storms are only nice to watch, not be a part of!" Time to strip out of his jacket and hoodie.

Charles: "I don't know," Charles chuckled, peeling out of his sweater and resisting the urge to wring the entire mess out onto the floor. "I enjoy this weather when I dress for it. Perhaps we should have checked today's forecast before we left."

Bronwyn: "Or teleported into the house," Bronwyn mused, following suit and shrugging out of her wet jacket. "Give me all those wet things, I'll throw them into the dryer and then call Marie to let her know we're comin'."

Vincent: "Well, excuse me," Vincent grinned. "I'm not perfect!" Now, to the kitchen for milk! "Yes, ma'am!"

Charles: Charles chuckled, and gratefully handed over his sweater for drying. "Thanks."

Bronwyn: Bronwyn grinned back. "Ye're forgiven."

Clothes were put into the dryer, fresh ones distributed, towels offered. And of course, Marie was called.

A few minutes later everything was ready to go.

"All right, ye two, into my car. We're goin' on an adventure."

Vincent: "Yes ma'am," chimed the familiar again, mouth full of gingersnaps.

Charles: "Excelsior," Charles mumbled, tipping a nod in Bronwyn's direction even has he ducked into the car. He tugged nervously at his borrowed sweatshirt and braced himself for whatever was coming.

Bronwyn: The visit to Marie didn't provide any concrete answers, but it did assure them that they were headed in the right direction.

Marie explained that there were a couple of hoodoo rituals that could achieve the effects they described, but the symbol on Lawrence proved it was not hoodoo and did in fact belong to a djinn. She also told them that there were many different species of djinn, one for every culture in the world and all with varying degrees of power.

"And I guarantee," she had said, "That this is not what your Mason intended to be the result of his dealings with this creature."

Charles: Something loosened in Charles' chest. Reluctant as he was to admit it, even to himself, a part of him had wondered if all of this wasn't what Mason wanted-- a fresh start, free of all the chains of his former life... including Charles. The relief was almost painful. He dropped his head into his hands and heaved a trembling sigh, heedless of his audience. When he'd managed to collect himself, he spoke clearly, though he did not lift his head. "What are our options? How do we proceed?"

Bronwyn: "Only two options, Mr. Charles. You kill or you negotiate."

Charles: His face went ashen, and he was oh-so glad that no one could see it. Of. Fucking. Course. "Well. I'd prefer to negotiate, but I'll do what I must to save my... to save Mason. How do I find this djinn creature? And how do I kill it?"

Bronwyn: "Djinn cannot be summoned like demons. You have to go out and look. And until they in front of you, no way to tell which species it is. Once you know species, then you can find way to kill."

Charles: "Oh." It was never simple, was it?

Vincent: "So...what do we need to do now?"

Bronwyn: Marie gave Charles' hand a pat. "Go out and look, little raven. Good chance Mason knows the djinn."

Charles: Charles nodded and raised his head, managing to pull a smile out of somewhere. "That's... all right. Thank you. This has been very enlightening."

Vincent: Vincent just looked to his mistress and sighed. He felt bad for Charles, but what could he do?

Bronwyn: Bronwyn gave her familiar the same look he gave her. Short of snapping their fingers and setting the world to rights, there was no immediate fix for this.

Marie patted Charles' hand again. "You're welcome, Mr. Charles."

"Hey Marie?"

Their hostess turned to Bronwyn. "Yes?"

"Do ye know of any djinn around here?"

She nodded. "Hooker in the French quarter. Name is Lila."

"Would she know of any other djinn?"

Marie shrugged. "Couldn't hurt to ask."

Charles: Charles' smile brightened ever so slightly. At least it was something to work with. He cast an appreciative glance at Bronwyn for staying level-headed when he was so obviously distraught. "Lead the way. Thank you again, Marie. Truly."

Vincent: The word "hooker" brought a blush to the familiar's cheeks. "Well, this is about to be an experience." Vincent bowed to their hostess and fell into step beside Bronwyn.

Bronwyn: "Aye, thank ye, Marie."

"No problem, sweeties." She kissed Bronwyn's cheek. "Go see your mama, she went shopping for you." The mama Marie was referring to was Lydia, an old mutual friend that saw Bronwyn as the daughter she never had.

"I will."

Once they were out in the car, Bronwyn sighed. "How the hell are we goin' to find a hooker in the daytime in a storm?"

Charles: "A brothel would be my best guess." Charles shrugged, pulling down the hood of his borrowed jacket and watching the rapidly-flooding streets with little interest. "But I don't suppose they would openly advertise what they're selling, even in a city like this one. We could always wait until tonight. After the storm's passed?"

Vincent: "We've come to a strange pothole in this path towards victory," said the familiar.

Bronwyn: "We have," Bronwyn said with a nod. "And aye, I think we're goin' to have to wait for tonight." She peeked up at the sky. "Hopefully the storm lets up by then. I don't think hookers work in the rain."

Charles: "Tonight, then." Waiting would be torture, but at least they had a game plan.

Vincent: "That word hits the ear wrong when you say it, ma'am," the familiar laughed. He just couldn't sympathize with the druid and mutant in this situation, as he didn't know Mason Atlas intimately. This was just another adventure.

Bronwyn: Leave it to Vincent to find some levity in all this.

Bronwyn chuckled softly. "How about we call them workin' girls?" She didn't like the word whore. It was so....aggressive.

Vincent: "Working girls. I like. Sounds progressive. It's their body, their business. Literal business! Cha-ching!"

Bronwyn: She laughed again. "I'm sure Lila will appreciate the progressive attitude if we manage to find her."

Charles: Despite himself, and the entire situation, Charles snorted out a laugh, dragging a hand down his face. "Indeed. What'll we do until then?"

Vincent: "Oh! There is an ice cream parlor nearby!" chimed the black hole.

Bronwyn: "Ice cream sounds good right now." Never mind that it was freezing outside. "What do ye say I buy us some banana splits?"

Charles: Charles was always, always dfs (down for sweets). His distant expression brightened considerably despite the cold, and he tossed a smile in Bronwyn's direction. "Make mine a sundae and you've got yourself a deal."

Vincent: "Perfect." They were in such a rush to get this done, obviously. Vincent should have been more mature about this, but ice cream was important!

Bronwyn: "Sundae it is." Rush or not, the rain was halting their progress. Might as well spend the time doing--and eating--something enjoyable.

Bronwyn parked in front of the ice cream parlor.

Charles: Charles didn't hesitate to brave the torrent. There was never a bad time for ice cream, and he planned to take full advantage of the down time. If he couldn't have Mason just now, at least he could have strawberry syrup.

Vincent: As usual, Vincent was the first to finish eating and the first to get brain freeze. He would have to be scolded, as usual, and an hour into the train the familiar was growing frustrated.

Bronwyn: He had been scolded; gently, but scolded nonetheless. And he definitely wasn't the only one getting frustrated and antsy.

"Do ye think people would notice if I suddenly made the storm disappear?"

Charles: Charles was still picking over a bowl of peanuts, restless and eager to make a move. Any idea that would help that along was a good one, in his opinion. "Possibly. But I could make sure that they don't." His telepathic range was well over three hundred miles, and this was an emergency. Or at least as far as he was concerned.

Vincent: "Maybe just a - maybe we could - I mean this is an emergency to you two."

Bronwyn: "I don't think it'll come to that if I do it gradually. Like so." Bronwyn took a deep breath, making sure to keep her now-glowing eyes turned away from the rest of the people in the parlor as she slowly made the rain taper off.

Charles: Charles grinned. Positively beamed. It was probably the brightest smile he'd shown since learning of Mason's predicament. If there was one thing that never failed to capture (and keep) Charles Xavier's interest, it was a display of fantastic power. Too bad Bronwyn was a fully grown druid, and not a young mutant. He would have offered a place at his school on the spot. "That's incredible." he whispered, studiously arranging a handful of nuts into an umbrella on the tabletop to remain inconspicuous even through his excitement.

Vincent: "Best I can do is make it rain like a bucket of water over someone's head," Vincent grumbled. "Never going to be that amazing." Mist was his favorite type of rain, so at least he could smile at that.

Bronwyn: Bronwyn smiled, though her focus remained on the clouds in the sky. "I could try to teach ye if ye want," she said to Vincent. "I'm pretty sure ye have enough magic to pull it off."

Charles: Their relationship was a unique one, and Charles couldn't quite liken it to anything else. Charming as he found it, however, his mind drifted elsewhere. "How long do you suppose we should wait?"

Vincent: "How long does it take hookers to come out of hiding?" Wait... "Was that insensitive?"

Bronwyn: She chuckled. "I have no idea. We can ask Lila once we find her. And I'm guessin' we better go now. We know the rain won't come back, but the hookers don't. They'll want to get some business while they can."

And off to the seediest street in the French Quarter.

Charles: He was probably not as uncomfortable as he should have been, with the proceedings. Hands shoved deep into pockets, Charles scanned the block, even as it began to come to life. He flitted easily from mind to mind. It was like finding a needle in a bloody haystack, of course. He didn't even know what the person he was searching for looked like, let alone who her friends and confidants might be. He wasn't without hope, however. Best way to find a needle in a haystack? Bring a magnet. With a glance toward Bronwyn for unspoken support, he crossed the street to greet a woman with blonde curls piled high atop her head and a half-burned cigarette hanging from her lips.

Vincent: "What's he doing?" Vincent asked. "Just going to ask around for her? Should I?"

Bronwyn: Bronwyn nodded as she followed Charles. "Aye. That's the only way I can think to find her. And no, stay close, love." She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. "I don't like the way some o' these men are lookin' at ye."

She gave the woman what she hoped was a pleasant, unthreatening smile. "Hello, miss. Could we ask ye a question?"

Charles: The blonde smiled pleasantly as the man hailed her, shoulders straightening and fingers tucking an errant curl back into her knot. He was pretty, had a kind face and, by the look of him, money to blow. Such a combination was always an indicator of a good night to come. She'd hit the jackpot. Of course, she'd never been particularly lucky. It really should have come as no surprise that the chick and her sidekick sidled up as well. Groups were always a bad idea. Her face went stony as she prepared for a firm rebuff.

Charles reached the woman first, and, undeterred by her cold demeanor, offered her the warmest smile he could muster. "We're looking for someone," he began after Bronwyn. "A woman by the name of Lila. We were told we could find her, here." He winced inwardly as her expression shuttered further.

"Who's askin'?"

Vincent: "The men?" Vincent looked around. Men were looking at him? It hadn't come to his attention. "I thought women were the ones to be cautious with around here," he whispered, slipping into silence as Charles began his interrogation.

Bronwyn: "Looks like ev'ryone should be cautious," she whispered back.

And sure enough, there were men looking at Vincent; some were merely curious, others were sizing him up in every sense of the phrase while they did the same to Bronwyn.

Why did the prospective djinn have to be a hooker?

Bronwyn noticed the woman withdrawing as well, which was why she reached into her purse.

"Benjamin Franklin," she said smoothly, holding up a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

Charles: Well, that was the type of motivation that she lived for. She reached to try and pluck the bill from the woman's hand before she could take it away and tuck it into her bustier. Still, all the money in the world couldn't make her rat out another girl. Strangers didn't come around looking for pros by name unless there was trouble. "Look, Lila don't work down here no more. She cleaned herself up, got a real nice apartment with some rich fella down in Laplace. That's all I know." It was a good lie, and she'd be long gone before they figured it out.

Charles smiled, seeming grateful for the bullshit information. He hadn't reached out to the woman with the intention of her telling them anything. He only wanted to mention Lila's name. Once he got a person thinking about another, it was child's play to pluck information out of their heads. "Thanks. Enjoy the rest of your evening, ma'am. Shall we?" He turned to his companions, wanting to get out of earshot before he told them anything.

Bronwyn: Bronwyn squinted at the woman, not entirely certain if she believed her. People usually parted with information quite easily if there was profit to be made but usually it took more than a hundred dollars. She was about to offer another bill when Charles gave the woman his thanks.

She smiled. Who needed money when there was a telepath around?

"We shall. Come on, Vincent." Bronwyn squeezed her familiar's hand and followed Charles. "So where is Lila really?" she asked when there was no one in earshot.

Charles: Charles grinned. It was refreshing to have friends (?) not put off by the casual use of his ability. He'd have to spend more time with Druids and the like. "She works out of a hotel not far from here." He hadn't caught a name, but he knew what the building looked like and its general location. "This way. How best to approach the situation, do you think?"

Vincent: "Do you have a gun? Would a gun hurt a djinn?" Vincent smiled, lacing his fingers with his mistress'. "I know. A squirt gun."

Bronwyn: "Well, I have more money and a knife. Guns are at home, but I don't know if they'd do any damage." Bronwyn chuckled. "Now one o' those might. Maybe we should just talk to her and offer to pay for her time?"

Charles: Charles winced slightly, shoved his hands into his pockets and ducked his head low as they walked. "Fresh out of weapons, I'm afraid." Well, aside from his own mind. "I think payment and a simple conversation would be best, yes. Agreed." The walk was a short one, and soon enough a grand, old building loomed into view. "Here we are."

Vincent: "Well, she has taste in hotels, that's for sure," Vincent admired. "I'll just...stay behind you two."

Bronwyn: "Ye can say that again." The blond woman might not have been telling the entire truth, but Lila had definitely moved up in life.

Well, as much as a prostitute could while still remaining a prostitute.

Bronwyn gave Vincent's hand a reassuring squeeze. "That's fine, love. I think Charles should take the lead."

Charles: "Me?" Charles paled, which was remarkable given his complexion. He was good in a pinch, but he didn't know the first thing about djinn outside of how to pronounce their name. Still, he didn't want to let anyone down, Mason least of all. "All right." He squared his shoulders and strolled through the double doors with all the grace of a born and raised blue-blood. Lila would be at the hotel bar finding clients, if his hunch was sound.

Bronwyn: Bronwyn nodded. "Aye. It's always hard to know how one supernatural creature will react to another. Most tend to be hostile. The fact that ye're human despite yer ability might work in our favor."

Once again she followed Charles, high-heeled boots echoing on the marble floor. She was trying to give off a non-threatening aura. Druids weren't exactly known to be unfriendly and threatening but it couldn't hurt to try to give some reassurance. She was a Druid on a mission, after all.

Charles: One could hope so. He found his way to the bar easily enough, most businesses such as this made their layout as uncomplicated as possible for the customer. Charles scanned the patrons as casually as he could before taking a seat next to a woman in a form-fitting cocktail dress. Her hair was long and dark, but he couldn't see any obvious signs of her being... other. Still, she matched the memories that he'd plucked from the mind of the other woman. Taking a deep breath, he ordered a strong drink, keeping maybe-Lila in his periphery. I think this may be her? Do djinn look different from humans in any way? Just to be sure... He chanced dropping the inquiry into Bronwyn's mind, hoping she was not bothered by the intrusion. They hadn't discussed boundaries in any way, but this was an urgent matter.

Vincent: Vincent wasn't usually this quiet, but without command he felt no need to say or do anything but cling to Bronwyn's side. Not quite a bodyguard, not quite a servant. Something almost child-like.

Bronwyn: Other than her own, there was only one other voice Bronwyn was accustomed to hearing in her head, and that voice was her familiar's. Hearing Charles' without any warning gave her a bit of a start that hopefully no one besides Vincent noticed.

'It is,' she thought back, rubbing the spot on her hip where her Mark lay. It was prickling something awful. 'Most djinn can pass as human, especially if they're using a glamour. That's Lila.'

"Want a drink, love?" she asked Vincent, giving him a reassuring smile.

Charles: Charles drained his drink, then another, before he gathered the courage to take action. This was it. Another path that could lead to his beloved, or another dead end. Turning to face the woman full-on, he offered her his brightest smile. Was it better to dive right in with the true motivation behind this conversation, or beat around the bush? He didn't know, but he could feel himself losing nerve. "Erm. Hello. I was wondering if I might borrow a moment of your time..."

Vincent: "No thanks," he whispered. "I'm fine." If he had one thing he'd want another, and another, and this was meant to be important, more important than his bottomless pit of greed.

Bronwyn: The woman that called herself Lila slid Charles a sidelong glance before devoting her attention on her drink again.

"Your face is earnest," she said by way of reply. Her voice was cool and crisp and ever so slightly accented. What the origins of that accent were, only she knew. "And your eyes are kind. Have they served you well?"

Charles: His charm failed him. There was something slightly disconcerting about the woman. Something otherworldly. Charles supposed he knew what, but knowing and experiencing were two different beasts. When he spoke, it was with all of his barriers down. "My... eyes?"

Bronwyn: She gave a single nod. "In your profession. Has your kindness and earnestness served you well?"

Charles: "I..." He had to give it a moment's consideration, but the answer was obvious when it came. "Yes. Yes, I believe that it has."

Bronwyn: "Do you believe it will serve you well here?"

Charles: He blinked. Well, shit. "I suppose that's up to you." Another long, pregnant pause. Charles wasn't prepared to be on this side of the interrogation. It was throwing him for a loop. "...does this mean you know why I'm here?"

Bronwyn: "Hmm." Lila looked from the man to his companions. She could only detect that vaguely Faerie-like aura from one of them, but they both smelled of the forest. Perhaps that was why they clung to each other.

She sipped her cosmopolitan. "You are here for the same reason as all the others before you. You want something."

Charles: "I do," he admitted, not bothering with coy evasion. Charles was out of his depth. "I'm... we're looking for information. I'd be willing to pay for it."

Bronwyn: She looked at his companions. The woman immediately ducked her head, which made Lila's lips curve in a barely there smile. Druids would never lose the respect their Faerie forefathers had bred into them.

"How did you come to find yourself in league with a little Faerie and her...." Lila inhaled. "...raven?"

Charles: He hesitated, briefly, unsure of how much to tell her. Or how much she already knew. "Friends of a friend," he said finally, which was true enough. "That friend is why I came to you, actually. He's in a spot of trouble." Understatement of the century.

Bronwyn: "If he were in merely a spot of trouble, your Faerie and her raven would've been all the help you needed."

Charles: "Fair enough." It was true, after all. His hands twitched slightly where they wrapped around his glass. "The friend in question got involved with a djinn. I don't know any of the details, but I know that he lives here. Do you know of him?" Charles didn't have a name. He didn't know if these creatures ran in similar circles. He was throwing his hopes blindly at the woman's feet.

Bronwyn: "We are not social beings. This is a very large city with an aura that attracts many kinds. Knowing that, perhaps your friend should have exercised caution."

Charles: Charles turned to face her full-on. "Perhaps, but the time for regret has passed. You haven't answered my question, ma'am."

Bronwyn: "Save your money. I do not know of another. They might well exist, but they are not known to me."

Charles: "Please." A hint of panic threaded his voice; he sounded desperate enough to have turned a few heads. Everything. Everything he'd been through. This couldn't be another dead end. He couldn't stomach it. "Please, Lila. You must know something! A rumour? A guess?" Anything to avoid starting from scratch.

Bronwyn: Lila's only reaction to the emotional plea was a curious tilt of her head. "You have my sympathies, professor, but I do not have the information you seek."

A tall man in a dark suit appeared at the entrance to the bar. He smiled at Lila; she gave him her almost smile in return.

She finished her cosmo and slid off her stool. Before walking over to meet her client, she trailed a single finger across Charles' cheek.

"Do not fear, Charles of the house of Xavier. You already have the information you require."

Charles: No. No, he very much did not have the information he required. Charles didn't bother to watch her leave. His head sank to the sticky bar-top as the crippling pain consumed him. For a moment, at least, Bronwyn and Vincent were forgotten. What was he going to do? So distraught was he, he did not question how the woman had known his name.

Bronwyn: A few moments passed before Charles would feel a gentle hand on his shoulder. "We'll find him," Bronwyn said softly, resting her head on his shoulder as she gave him a one-armed hug. "Come hell or high water, we'll find Mason."

Charles: His eyes were damp and red-rimmed, but he accepted the offered comfort. It was easy to forget that Bronwyn loved Mason, as well. He returned her embrace with a fleeting flicker of a smile. "Yes," he agreed. "Yes." He had to believe it was true, no matter how tired he was of disappointment. "We should go? I don't want to be here any longer."

Bronwyn: She nodded. "Aye. Let's go home."

Holding one of Charles' and Vincent's hands in each of her own, Bronwyn led them out of the hotel. They'd go home, they'd regroup, and they would bring Mason back.

#Nothing but Dead Ends thread #askprofessorx #vincentcorvidae #elevatorsandink

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